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| The Special Board of Canvassers headed by Deputy Consul General Kit de Jesus tallies Hong Kong votes at Bayanihan. |
By the SUN Staff
Rodrigo Duterte won a landslide victory in the presidential race in Hong Kong on May 9, as the mostly OFW voters in the city expressed their sentiment against the alleged neglect of the workers’ plight by the government in Manila.
His triumph in Hong Kong, where more than 46,000 Filipinos began voting on April 9, was replicated in the Philippines as well as in other OFW destinations abroad and gave the Philippines its first president from Mindanao.
Votes tallied by the Special Board of Canvassers at the Bayanihan Center in Kennedy Town showed Duterte on top with 30,277 votes when the panel adjourned at 3:30 a.m.
The 72-year-old incumbent Davao City mayor was followed by Miriam Defensor-Santiago with 7,089 votes.
Trailing them were Mar Roxas with 4,533, Grace Poe with 2,898 and Jojo Binay with 1,118.
Roy Señeres, who died Feb 8 but whose name was not taken off the ballots, got 10 votes.
Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos also pulled away with 25,432 votes, with his closest rival Alan Peter Cayetano getting 12,496 votes, Leni Robredo with 6,155, Chiz Escudero with 1,382, Antonio Trillanes IV with 287, and Gringo Honasan with 178.
The votes counted came from 46,396 voters who cast their ballots during the month-long exercise, representing a 49% turnout by the 93,978 registered voters listed in 224 clustered precincts. The precincts totaled 95.
Hopes that Hong Kong would clinch a 50% turnout faded when only 839 people voted on the final day.
This followed the disappointing 5,474 votes on May 8, the last Sunday of overseas voting that Consulate officials had hoped would add about 7,000 votes more to the total tally for the month-long elections.
The atmosphere was largely somber in the main hall of Bayanihan Center, where a crowd dominated by poll watchers from the Duterte and Migrante camps observed the counting.
Heavy rain over a vast area of Guangdong province including Hong Kong delayed the canvassing of votes cast by Filipinos in Taiwan, Macau, Beijing and the rest of China.
The SBOC was originally scheduled to reconvene at 2pm of May 10 to count the votes,
But the rainstorm delayed the arrival of election results from China, according to Consulate officials. Canvassing resumed only at past 7pm.
Consul General Bernardita Catalla was at Bayanihan on the last day of voting, overseeing the processing of arriving voters. Then in the evening she mingled with the media and community leaders as she watched the canvassing of the votes in the center’s auditorium.
In this year’s general elections, a better version of the controversial PCOS vote counting machine was used, which improved the election process from the voting to the vote counting.
The system calls for the collation of SD cards in the precincts upstairs, for uploading of data to the Collating and Canvassing System, which will transmit the results to the national canvassing center in Manila.
Some unexplained glitches in the system, however, sparked rumors of cheating, but only five affidavits of complaint related to vote counting machine malfunction had been lodged with the polling center secretariat. They were transmitted to the Commission on Elections in Manila for investigation.
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| Tidying up after one-month election period. |
However, election officials said complaints of missing names or the wrong candidates appearing on the receipt printout could have been due to human error.
On the last day of voting, for instance, one voter said she chose Duterte as president then went on to mark the bullet on the next line, thinking it was for his vice presidential candidate Cayetano. That “over-voting” mistake invalidated her vote for Duterte.
Vigilance of the special board of election inspectors in one precinct was challenged on May 8 when a man who was not a registered voter went up to one of the rooms, presented his coupon, and was handed a ballot.
It was too late when the SBEI members noticed he was not the same man as in the picture on the ballot registry. By the time the lapse was noticed, the man had already marked the names of some candidates on the ballot. The SBEI took back the spoiled ballot and handed the man to the secretariat.
It turned out the coupon was handed to him by one of the political campaigners along Victoria Road outside the Bayanihan.
On May 6, a total of 546 more voters cast their ballots following a dramatic surge on May 5 as members of the Iglesia Ni Cristo began casting their ballots.
At the close of polling, 829 votes had been tallied, a record high for a weekday, which drove up the total votes to 37,399.
The total represented a 40.5% turnout of the more than 93,000 registered Filipino voters in Hong Kong. An otherwise smooth going in the precincts was marred by another complaint from a voter about an alleged receipt misprint.
“The voter said she marked Bongbong Marcos for vice president but it was the name of Gregorio Honasan that appeared on the printed receipt,” said Consul Charles Macaspac, the officer of the day.
He said the woman filed an affidavit, the sixth to do so out of about 20 who made a similar complaint.
Election officials in Hong Kong have been urging voters to fill up a pro forma affidavit if they believe they have been cheated out of their votes so that the Comelec could investigate their complaints.
The number of voters rose abruptly to 546 on May 4, bringing the total tally since April 9 to 36,570.
Meanwhile, Vice Consul Alex Vallespin, who was in charge of the elections, said the special board of election inspectors in the cities in Greater China where elections for overseas Filipinos were held would be asked to print out results of the balloting, which their representatives would bring to Hong Kong for canvassing. He said the printed election results would be counted manually.
Whoever will be named to represent the Beijing post would join Consul General Lilibeth Deapera of the Consulate in Macau and Deputy Consul General Christian de Jesus to constitute the SBOC.
Only 369 voted on May 3, one of the lowest daily results, but it still helped lift the total tally after 25 days to 36,024, or a turnout of 38.7%.
The overseas voting in Hong Kong has attracted foreign media, with a staff from Japan’s Nikkei visiting Bayanihan on May 3 to interview Vallespin and other election officials about the balloting.
On April 30, TVB interviewed ConGen Catalla about the 2016 elections.
Foreign investors are watching the unfolding events in the Philippines as the outcome can influence business decisions.
A total of 3,627 voted on May 2, as Filipinos took advantage of the holiday to cast their ballots. The votes lifted the tally in Hong Kong to 35,655.
With just a full week of voting left, Consulate officials look hard-pressed to reach their 50% turnout target but did not seem overly concerned.
ConGen Catalla said she was satisfied with the conduct of the elections, citing the nearly 9,000 people who voted in the past two days alone.
“We’ve been urging people to come out and vote because this is the life of our nation, it is part of decision-making. Ngayon, kung yung mga pinili natin ay hindi karapat-dapat, sisisihin tayo ng mga generations after us; kung maayos, pasasalamatan tayo,” she said.
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| Consulate and POLO staff pose forposterity with volunteers. |
Vallespin said there were two reports of ballot receipt misprints on May 2, but in both cases the voters refused to file a formal complaint.
In Room 502, a woman complained to the SBEI that the vote counting machine did not print out the names of her choices for president and vice president. She later admitted that she failed to properly shade the circles corresponding to her candidates. She declined to file an affidavit about the problem.
The second incident involved a woman who made a scene in room 501 because her voting receipt allegedly bore the name of Alma Moreno instead of her chosen senator.
She also refused to file a formal complaint.
On May 1, with just eight days to go in the overseas voting, Consulate officials remained positive that turnout would hit 50% even if the number of voters fell to 5,327, below expectations.
About 40 people were unable to vote after finding themselves having been deactivated by the Comelec. About 115 other had registered but their names were missing on the voters list and waited for the election secretariat to get them Comelec clearance to vote.
Election officials said earlier in the exercise that they were expecting the Sunday voter crowd to reach 7,000, but that did not materialize.
At one point, followers of Duterte got so raucous that Vallespin and about six police officers rushed to the terminal to ask the campaigners to tone down.
“It turned out that somebody made a 999 call because one group was becoming rowdy,” said Vallespin, who spoke to leaders of the various campaign groups at the terminal.
Two voting-related incidents were reported, with one voter complaining she picked Marcos as her vice president but her ballot receipt bore the name of Honasan.
“I asked the voter if she was sure about what she’s saying and she said ‘yes,’ because she was even campaigning for Bongbong,” said Jun Carlos, a Bongbong campaign leader.
He cast doubt on claims by some quarters that there was cheating in the overseas voting in Hong Kong just because there were 2 out of over 26,000 who claimed so.
A woman filed an affidavit of complaint about her failing to vote because when she went to a mobile registration in Discovery Bay on Sept 5, she was told she did not have to register as she was still an active voter.
She was told she had been deactivated.
By Vir B. Lumicao
