It's now official. Twelve of the senatorial candidates have been proclaimed by the Commission On Elections.
3:28 am | Monday, May 20th, 2013
A Malacañang official on Sunday backed the proclamation of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) of winning senatorial candidates ahead of the full count of votes, but said anybody could hale the agency to court.
“The Comelec is the Comelec,” Budget Secretary Florencio Abad, a senior political adviser to President Aquino, said by phone. “At the end of the day, it’s the Comelec that oversees the election process. We should trust that it knows what it’s doing.”
Abad said that unless it could be proven that the Comelec violated its own rules, it should be presumed that it had been exercising its function with regularity. “People are free to go to the courts,” he said.
Election lawyers and watchdogs have argued that the proclamation of nine of the 12 candidates before all the votes could be counted was a breach of election rules. They pressed the Comelec to void the partial proclamation.
Section 20 of the Amended Automated Election System Law of 2007 provides that the certificate of canvass, which is to be considered official election results and used as a basis for the proclamation of a winning candidate, should be produced only upon completion of the canvass, they said. (click link for entire story)
1:55 am | Sunday, May 19th, 2013
It’s 9-3 in favor of the administration coalition as the final three winning senators—Cynthia Villar, JV Ejercito and Gregorio Honasan—were finally proclaimed Saturday night as the Commission on Elections
(Comelec) completed the canvassing of all locally cast votes in the senatorial race.
Five days after the voting ended, the Comelec, sitting as the national board of canvassers (NBOC), proclaimed as winners Villar, Ejercito and Honasan, after the last local certificate of canvass (COC) from Lanao del Norte arrived at 5.33 p.m.
Honasan successfully hung on to 12th place, beating Richard Gordon by a margin of more than 700,000 votes.
With the proclamation of all the winners, the scorecard of the mid-term senatorial election was 9-3, with the administration-backed Team PNoy winning nine slots. Only Nancy Binay, Ejercito and Honasan belong to the opposition United Nationalist Alliance.
After snubbing the Comelec’s previous proclamation ceremonies, winning candidates Binay and Aquilino Pimentel III showed up at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) Saturday night, receiving their certificates of proclamation together with Villar, Ejercito and Honasan.
Pimentel said he decided to show up Tuesday night after Comelec officials addressed the concerns that he raised on Friday.
“The proclamation [on Friday] was premature [but] I asked a lot of questions and I think the system is secure enough, and it’s now more difficult to manipulate than the one we used during the manual [voting],” he told reporters. (click link for entire story)
Updated May 13, 2013 - 9:20am

1. 20,147,423 votes
POE, GRACE

2. 18,482,961 votes
LEGARDA, LOREN

3. 17,408,543 votes
CAYETANO, ALAN PETER

4. 17,332,952 votes
ESCUDERO, CHIZ

5. 16,645,515 votes
BINAY, NANCY

6. 15,858,995 votes
ANGARA, SONNY

7. 15,388,992 votes
AQUINO, BAM

8. 14,584,612 votes
PIMENTEL, KOKO

9. 13,995,603 votes
TRILLANES, ANTONIO IV

10. 13,696,120 votes
VILLAR,CYNTHIA

11. 13,552,991 votes
EJERCITO ESTRADA, JV

12. 13,070,031 votes
HONASAN, GRINGO
(based on the Comelec partial and official election tally)
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