Francisco Tatad: Leni innocent on cheating on BBM, Aquino ‘real villain’

In a column by journalist and politician, Francisco Tatad for the Manila Times, the man laid down facts to prove that BBM was in fact cheated on during the 2016 elections and claimed that Leni Robredo might have been innocent. He says the one to blame is then president Benigno Aquino III.

The win for president Rodrigo Duterte was immediately accepted by the masses, regardless of who they voted for president. With the vote count reaching 16 million, nobody moved to question or fear that the count was manipulated. It was a clear victory, one that could nobody could deny. The win was sure.

However, the fear of the results being manipulated came not from the presidential races, but that of the vice-presidential.


Independent candidate Sen. Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos was leading the unofficial count from 5 pm of May 9 by as much as 1 million votes. Mysteriously, by 1 am of Tuesday, this was overtaken by Liberal Party candidate Leni Robredo in what analysts deemed "a undeviating linear or straight-line pattern". This confounded analysts.

After that, votes for Marcos stagnated while votes for Robredo increased mysteriously by the same percentage for every 40,000 votes until the Marcos lead was completely eradicated.

Photo by politics.com.ph

This pattern resembled the incident during the 2013 elections when Aquino's candidates swept the polls following a 60-30-10 formula all over the country. This means that in exactly 59,666 precincts all over the country, all the counts were identical. 60 percent went to Aquino's candidates, 30 percent for UNA, and 10 percent for the independents.

Out of frustration from the belief that their votes will be stolen in the elections, many Filipinos did not vote this year. Some who did were furious when they suspected that the vice-presidential vote was once again manipulated by those who can.

MUST READ: Tatad explains Aquino’s ‘fear’ of the Marcoses

Here are some facts about the Robredo win, from Tatad's article:

• Robredo got more votes than her running mate Mar Roxas in his domain, where she was “virtually unknown”.
• Robredo got more votes in areas where there was  "completely no basis". 
• For example, in one precint in Basilan, she got 529 votes where Marcos got zero. This is "an incredible phenomenon with no acceptable explanation" since generally, muslims do not favor women holding political positions, so if there was someone who got a zero, “it should have been Robredo and not Marcos”.
• Tatad claims that a friend of his who monitored the elections stated, “I’ve seen with my own eyes how hundreds to thousands of votes got electronically altered during the process of transmission and manual importation. This is by far the best evidence of how canvassed results could be changed and thus wreak havoc on the electoral system."

In rumor, the Liberal Party at first wanted to manipulate the votes for Roxas. But when the advantage for Duterte reached 6 million votes, they gave up and the operation was allotted for Robredo instead.

The plan is to impeach Duterte in time so Robredo could hold office.

Tatad claims however, that Robredo might be innocent in all this scam, and that the real villain was then president Nonoy Aquino. Robredo, just like BBM, was a victim.

Everything was done to inflate Robredo's votes. Allegedly, there was a float of 3 million votes, and there were several reports of the use of an "intermediary server" which acts as the illegal laundering machine for votes in transits from precincts to the final canvassing center.

This angered Filipinos who put in the effort of casting their votes, hopeful for a clean election process “only to be fooled again by the ones in power”. MJM

ALSO READ: Robredo: BBM should be banned from public office

Source: Manila Times

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