“The PET declared it cannot junk the whole protest on a claim of an additional 15,000 votes based on altered rules on shading favoring Robredo. That would render her win as merely speculative and thus solves nothing.

Almost four years has passed from the 2016 elections that witnessed the routing of the Liberal Party’s presidential bet despite the LP electoral machine’s superiority in logistics, it’s hold on local operators where the LP candidate headed the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), their fat cat funding sources, and the undeniable involvement of the former Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairman, now a fugitive from justice.

That Rodrigo R. Duterte was an underdog cannot be denied. That there were attempts to keep the presidency in the clutches of the LP has been long suspected. Had not Duterte’s mandate been overwhelming and continuously revalidated, then an LP president might have perpetuated from Benigno Aquino III through to Manuel Roxas and then Leonor Robredo.

The blueprint was to perpetuate the LP in power. Never mind that democracy be damned where presidential succession remained among the most incompetent.

Robredo is a case in point. Armed with Smartmatic catalysts and traditional terror tactics in Muslim Mindanao, the game plan was to have her apprentice as vice president for six years and then have a go at the presidency.

Simply look at the controversies that characterized the 2016 elections. While Duterte had eventually won, analysts are unanimous in describing his victory as the result of a mandate so overwhelmingly robust that any amount of electoral anomalies could not stop his eventual presidency.

It did not help the LP that their elitist bet, in comparison to Duterte, had a series of scandals proving his ineptitude under Aquino’s Cabinet.

What marred the 2016 derby was the race for the vice presidency. Almost all who ran were not the first choices of their respective presidential co-runners. Worse, even by basic standards, almost all were unqualified to accede to the presidency.

The most formidable candidate came from the weakest slate. Worse, the state’s own electoral machinery was working alongside the LP thus gifting the LP vice-presidential candidate unwarranted if not illegal advantages.

These, together with a Comelec few trusted, produced aggregate aberrations ranging from questions on ballot shading, to counting machine program tampering, to the questionable independence of Smartmatic, to missing or destroyed election returns, to the absence of ballot images in Robredo’s bailiwick, to the magical presence of ballots where no real and free elections took place.

Consider each of the foregoing against the pre-election surveys on Robredo. Do the research. Where surveys were used as benchmarks to determine the credibility of either an eventual win or a loss, Robredo’s ratings were either the lowest or poorest. At best they see-sawed with another. As to the exit polls, she most definitely lost.

Aquino’s Comelec however proclaimed Robredo the winner.

When the protest calling for three distinct, non-sequential and separate courses of action against anomalies in the 2016 VP race was brought to the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), an Aquino appointee was then sitting as Chief Justice. During her incumbency, however invalid her position would later prove, the PET had in place its controversial Rule 65 that says where “the protestant or counter-protestant will most probably fail to make out his case, the protest may forthwith be dismissed, without further consideration of the other provinces mentioned in the protest.”

Obviously, truth surrendered to lazy convenience.

The protest against the 2016 VP proclamation had three courses of action addressing three separate anomalies. The first alleges a compromised automated election system. Any amount of discrepancy would show this. The second is a revision of ballots from contested precincts. The third seeks an annulment of results.

To their credit the PET has not yet dismissed the third course. The PET declared it cannot junk the whole protest on a claim of an additional 15,000 votes based on altered rules on shading favoring Robredo. That would render her win as merely speculative and thus solves nothing.

With the Comelec as PET amicus curiae despite being the accused under the first course of action, the first course was quickly denied.

That then hinged the whole protest on Rule 65. Sans tackling the third course licenses state-instigated fraud, turns a blind eye to magical results where no real voting occurred and effectively declares occupying the vice presidency on simple shading issues.