The late Jesse Robredo must have turned in his grave when his widow, Leni, declared that her (purported) victory in the vice-presidential contest was made more meaningful as it happened on his birthday.
The indications of cheating that made Leni “win” are so obvious.
For starters, Robredo won over Marcos in the Congress’ official count by 263,473 votes. This is almost exactly the same as her margin of 263,840 over Marcos in just two provinces. And perhaps, you guessed them right – Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao. Controlled by warlords and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), these areas can deliver the number of votes a candidate wants, if the price is right.
This has been going on for decades. Then presidential candidate Miriam Defensor-Santiago also lost by a landslide in these two provinces in the 1992 elections.
The following are the results of votes in these provinces, according to official Comelec data. Do you honestly think their residents, dominantly Muslims, were such big fans of Robredo as to give her such landslide margins?
This means that if the votes – which weren’t really votes – from these two provinces were not included, Marcos would have won:
But there are other provinces where Robredo very suspiciously won by a landslide, among these:
Can somebody please give me a rational explanation why Robredo won by a landslide in these provinces?
The vice presidential race, as well as that for the president, was to a great extent a tribal contest, with a candidate’s tribe and its expanded territory (regions) overwhelmingly voting for him or her.
For example, Marcos received about 300,000 votes, with Robredo getting a measly 4,000 in Ilocos Norte. (Figures here are rounded off for easier reading.) But Robredo garnered 800,000 votes from her bailiwick Camarines provinces, leaving Marcos with only 67,000.
Cebu gave Marcos a severe beating by delivering 400,000 more votes for Robredo. Cebu, of course, has continued to be a bastion of anti-Marcos sentiment, partly because of presidential candidate Sergio Osmena, Jr.’s colossal loss to Marcos in the 1969 presidential race, Sergio Osmena 3rd’s imprisonment by the strongman, and the fact that the so-called “oligarchs” he targeted during his regime were mostly from Cebu and Negros.
That President Aquino 3rd and his yellow cabal junked Roxas to throw resources into Robredo’s campaign to win the vice presidency (amid rumors of a Plan B under which President-elect Duterte is to be ousted later) is also quite obvious in that Robredo got significantly more votes than Roxas in several provinces. For instance, in the two provinces that gave Robredo the edge, Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao, she received 400,000 votes while Roxas got only 163,000.
Marcos’ bailiwicks (the “Solid North,” several Mindanao provinces and Leyte) cancelled out Robredo’s “bailiwicks,” which I put in quotation marks as these include areas into which the Liberal Party threw their resources, such as Negros, Cebu, and several provinces in Mindanao).
One thing that makes me very suspicious that Aquino and his yellow horde moved heaven and earth to cheat to have Robredo win, while throwing Roxas under the bus, are the results seen in the National Capital Region.
Marcos won by a landslide in the nation’s premium region, gaining 46 percent of the votes in the NCR, while Robredo got only 29 percent and Cayetano 13 percent.
This should worry Aquino and his rabid anti-Marcos forces. In the NCR, which has the ahighest literacy rate and the most developed media and information infrastructure, Filipinos either have forgiven Marcos’ father, forgotten his father or don’t believe in the yellow propaganda that Martial Law was a dark period of our history. There is not a single city in metropolitan Manila where Robredo won over Marcos. Even Quezon City, the site of anti-Marcos centers such as the University of the Philippines and the Ateneo voted 2 to 1 for Marcos.
Check out the table below and see how your city voted:
The NCR results are so radically different from those of the entire Philippines. This is an anomaly – the farther away from the capital and metropolitan region, the more significant the decline becomes of the media’s reach to disseminate a new name like “Robredo.” Where I voted in a southern province just two hours’ drive from Makati, I often even overheard people asking, “Sino ito si Lini Roberto?” How could Robredo, who campaigned only for a few months, win against somebody with a household name that started being disseminated 40 years ago?
The NCR results in past elections mirror the national results, probably since the region is actually a melting pot of migrants from all provinces. For instance, Duterte won 43 percent of the votes in NCR, just 4 percentage points higher than the 39 percent he received for the entire Philippines.
How can Robredo explain that Marcos won 46 percent of votes in the NCR, and yet he garnered only 35 percent of the votes nationwide, a huge drop of 11 percentage points? How can she explain she received only 29 percent in the NCR, yet got 6 percentage points more for the entire Philippines?
It will be expensive for Marcos to file an election protest, since he would have to pay for the costs of opening and examining each Election Return and Certificate of Canvass. Yet, the weaknesses of our electoral system must be corrected, or our democracy will continue to be a sham. He has to do it for the sake of the country.
Robredo’s “victory” must be exposed as a sham, representing the last gasps of the Yellow Force.
