Watch: PET Discovers Ballot Boxes in CamSur Have No Voters’ Receipt (Video)

Revisors of the Supreme Court (SC), which sits as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) discovered that several ballot boxes from Balatan, Camarines Sur had missing voters’ receipts. The discovery was made during the vote recount for the vice-presidential race in the 2016 election. Watch news video below.

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According to the report, the ballot boxes in CamSur that have no voter’s receipt were found on Tuesday, April 10, the sixth day of the VP vote recount. As we all know, Vice President Leni Robredo used to be the congresswoman of the province from 2013 to 2016 during the time of her partymate, then-President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III.

“This is highly irregular because the receipts had been required by law to be part of the documents to be included in the ballots boxes. Their absence in some of the ballot boxes is an indication that they were removed or really not included because the votes there will not tally with the machine count.” An insider from PET reportedly said.



“Comelec did not want to include the voter’s receipts but Sen. (Richard) Gordon fought for this feature which the SC upheld. Then we have this discovery. This is disheartening,” the anonymous insider added, noting this is very serious problem considering that it is the SC that ordered to include the voters' receipts in the election system.

Apparently, this is not the first controversy that the PET has encountered during the VP vote recount. On the first day, the camp of former Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., who filed the electoral protest against VP Robredo, found wet ballots 42 ballot boxes that were used by 42 clustered precincts in Baao, also in Camarines Sur.



Bongbong Marcos also complained that 38 ballot boxes have no audit logs, which is very important because they contain the record of the time the precinct opened, the time it was closed, and the time the votes were cast. On the third day, the PET also discovered that some excess, unused ballots in the same town had votes for Leni Robredo.

Contributed by Renato Pasayao