Manila (AsiaNews) - The incumbent President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo won over actor Fernando Poe Jr. with a margin of over 1 million votes, while Senator Noli de Castro won the vice presidency seat with about 800,000 votes: this is the election's final score after six weeks the Filipinos cast their votes for the presidency and vice-presidency. The 22-member Joint Congressional Committee finally finished the counting of votes based from 177 Certificates of Canvass, gathered from Filipinos working abroad or "Absentee Voters" and other parts of the country Sunday evening.
However, before Macapagal-Arroyo and de Castro can be proclaimed president and vice president, the Committee will have to submit their report to the Parliament on Wednesday, followed by debates on the report. These debates may take the same length and tedious pace as that of the period during the counting of the Certificates, despite the fact that the Philippine Constitution stipulates that the high government officials are to be declared by June 30.
Opposition leaders supporting Fernando Poe Jr. have continually opposed the credibility of some Certificates of Canvass, saying that these were tampered and bear false information, to the advantage of the present administration.
Meanwhile the National Secretariat for Social Action-Justice & Peace (NASSA) of the Bishops' Conference affirmed the credibility of the recent elections. A NASSA Executive Committee, after holding a special meeting in Tagaytay City last June 17, has come out with a synthesis paper summarizing the reports of 36 Diocesan Social Action Centres. In general the reports say that the elections were clean, peaceful and orderly. However, the reports also state of vote buying, disenfranchisement of voters, incompetence of the Commission on Election, election-related violence, adding and/or shaving of votes and power outages during the counting of votes. In Negros, for example, the landowners coerced their land workers to vote for certain candidates, for fear of being thrown out of the estate. Feudalism is still being widely practiced on this island where the landowners are called "sugar barons." In conclusion, the Committee expressed concern over the political and economic volatility caused by the slow and confrontational conduct of the Joint Congressional Committee during the canvassing for the presidential and vice presidential candidates. (SE)
