POE
An unflinching Sen. Grace Poe yesterday tagged former Interior Secretary Mar Roxas and Vice President Jejomar Binay behind attempts to derail her presidential run in the next year’s general elections.
Poe made the statement a day after the Commission on Elections (Comelec) Second Division voted to disqualify her as presidential contender for making false declaration regarding her citizenship and residency in her certificate of candidacy.
In a press briefing in Pasay City, the senator assailed the Comelec for its refusal to admit several documents which her camp had submitted to prove that she was a natural-born Filipino and that she had been a resident of the country since 2005.
“I’m not afraid,” a defiant Poe told reporters. “After all the allegations thrown at me, it only strengthened my belief that we should not let these kind of people to lead our country.”
“Who else would benefit from this? (There’s no one else) but my two rivals who, I’m sure, had sent their people to file these cases,” she said in Filipino.
Asked if she was referring to Binay and Roxas, she replied: “Yes, they’re the only ones.”
Poe said she expects that the other Comelec divisions handling the three separate disqualification complaints would also rule to bar her from running.
“But I don’t want to preempt what may happen because sometimes we’re surprised with their decisions,” she said.
She said she was confident that the Supreme Court would eventually rule in her favor like what it did to a similar disqualification case brought against her adoptive father, the late action star Fernando Poe Jr., who lost in the 2004 presidential elections.
Estrella Elamparo, the lawyer who filed the disqualification case against Poe that was granted by the Comelec second division, yesterday filed an urgent motion to exclude Poe’s name from the official list of candidates for the presidency and from the ballots to be utilized in the May 2016 polls.
Elamparo explained that her motion was in view of the resolution issued by Comelec Second Division disqualifying Poe by cancelling her COC for president.
In yesterday’s press briefing, Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said Poe’s name may still possibly be included in the list of candidates that will be printed on the official ballots for the 2016 polls despite the Comelec ruling.
“The tendency is that if there is a case that has not been resolved with finality, the tendency will be to put the name of the candidate on the list. It doesn’t matter who,” Jimenez said.
“If a person has a pending motion with any body that might have an effect on the candidacy, and they’re put on the ballot, it’s easier to ignore the votes cast for that person, than to take them out of the ballot and then later on find out that they should’ve been on the ballot in the first place,” he explained. Comelec is set to finalize the list of candidates by Dec. 15 and is expected to begin printing ballots in January.