Waiting for a bribe?

Something stinks in the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

The Comelec is in charge of deciding, among others, who is and who is not qualified to run for senator in the May 2019 elections. Any registered voter who has good reason to argue that a senatorial candidate is not qualified to run for senator can file with the election body a disqualification case against the candidate concerned.

As early as last year, two separate disqualification cases were filed with the Comelec. One was against ex-Sen. Sergio Osmeña III and another against incumbent Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III.

The disqualification case against Osmeña, filed by a department of the Comelec, came about after it was discovered that the ex-senator failed to submit his election campaign expenditure documents for the past two senatorial elections. Under the law, that failure is a ground for the disqualification of Osmeña in this year’s election.

On the other hand, the disqualification case against Pimentel involves senators’ term limitations imposed by the Constitution.

Pimentel first ran for the Senate in May 2007 for the 2007-2013 term. When he initially lost the 12th place to Juan Miguel Zubiri, Pimentel filed a protest with the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET). In August 2011, the SET ruled in favor of Pimentel and declared him the twelfth-place winner in the May 2007 senatorial election.

Obviously, the SET could not have installed Pimentel to any other term than the one he ran for, namely, the 2007-2013 term.

Pimentel was re-elected in 2013, which means he had been elected to the Senate for two consecutive terms. Under the Constitution, Pimentel is disqualified from running for a third consecutive term.

Surprisingly, Pimentel insists that he can still run this year because the Charter states that the term of office of a senator “shall be six years” and he served less than two years of his 2007-2013 term.

His argument has no legal justification.

When Pimentel won his protest against Zubiri in the SET, his election as senator for the 2007-2013 term was upheld.

In evaluating term limitations imposed by the Constitution for senatorial candidates, the consideration is not the number of consecutive years the senator has actually served, but the number of consecutive terms the senator was elected to. Having been elected to two consecutive terms ending in 2019, Pimentel cannot run for senator again in 2019.

For a Bar examination topnotcher, Pimentel isn’t thinking like one.

It has been months since the disqualification cases against Osmeña and Pimentel were filed with the Comelec. As of this writing, the election body has not acted on them.

So far, the press releases of the Comelec have been equivocal. After releasing what is supposed to be a final list of qualified senatorial candidates, which included the names of Osmeña and Pimentel, it said the two can still be disqualified eventually. What “eventually” means, James Jimenez, the haughty, bearded spokesman for the Comelec, refuses to disclose.

Jimenez regularly dispenses ambiguous statements to the media. If his job requires him to be deliberately misunderstood by the public, he certainly deserves his monthly salary.

How a supposed “final list” can still be changed at some undisclosed future period by the Comelec remains a mystery.

The inordinate, inexcusable delay on the part of the Comelec to categorically act on the disqualification cases against Osmeña and Pimentel may spell dire legal consequences for the voting population.

If the names of Osmeña and Pimentel are kept in the official ballot and they are eventually disqualified, voters may be misled into thinking that the two are still in the Senate race and may still vote for them. Those votes will be wasted.

That is the specter candidates and voters may face in the coming elections. For that, they can thank the failure or refusal of the Comelec to resolve with finality the separate disqualification cases currently pending against Osmeña and Pimentel.

The longer the agency sleeps on the two disqualification cases, the more people will ask that question.