By Dominique Gabriel G. Bañaga

Former Bacolod City Vice Mayor and defeated congressional candidate Jude Thaddeus Sayson welcomed the recent decision of the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal (HRET) dismissing for lack of merit the legal defenses of Bacolod Rep. Greg Gasataya.
Sayson stressed the ruling “proves the validity of my petition for a recount.” He added, “It shows that even the HRET saw the very big discrepancy on the total votes cast and the total votes tallied.”
In one of the closest races in recent memory, Sayon garnered 84,431 votes, while Gasataya received 85,467 votes winning by a razor thin margin of only 1,036 votes. The 2016 race for Lone District Representative was determined by only .4 percent of the City’s roughly 260,000 registered voters.
The Tribunal, in its undated notice signed by its Secretary Girlie Salarda, ruled that election contests involve public interest. As such, technicalities and procedural barriers should not be allowed to stand if they constitute an obstacle to the determination of the true will of the electorate in the choice of their elective officials.
It said the allegations in the petition of Sayson assailing and protesting the correctness of the election results and votes obtained by Gasataya in all 392 clustered precincts in Bacolod City resulting from the Vote Counting Machine’s rejection/omission of ballots cast by the electorate, and the malfunction/hacking of the VCM’s, “warrant the opening of the ballot boxes involved in order to examine and count the ballots to ascertain the congressional choice of the electorate of Bacolod.”
It pointed out that “the sufficiency of the petition of protest has to be determined in order that the Tribunal may proceed with the case and in due time, he (Sayson) will be given the opportunity to prove the veracity of his claims.”
“It also finds that there is no forum shopping committed in this case”, it added.
Sayson, who ran under the National Unity Party/Pamilya MKK, filed an election protest before the HRET last year against Gasataya of Grupo Progreso (GP), seeking a recount of the votes cast in all clustered precincts in Bacolod City during the May 9 elections.
In his answer dated Oct. 18, 2016, Gasataya said the petition filed by Sayson failed to state the specific acts or omissions complained of constituting electoral frauds, anomalies and irregularities in the contested precincts and that the latter has committed forum shopping.
“In our complaint, we did say that he cheated,” he said adding that what we pointed out was that the VCM’s “did not count the ballots correctly.”/WDJ