POE (INQUIRER PHOTO)
Sen. Grace Poe yesterday said only the Supreme Court can stop her presidential bid as her camp insisted that the poll body has set aside documents proving her residency in the Philippines since May 2005.
“I want to assure you that our fight is on. I was not disqualified by one division of the Commission on Elections because this is not final,” Poe said at a press briefing immediately after the Senate Electoral Tribunal affirmed with a 5-4 vote that she is a natural-born Filipino.
“We still have the Supreme Court to go to. If you can remember, the same thing happened to FPJ when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of him in March (before the May elections in 2004),” Poe said.
“It is important that my name is not removed from the ballots,” Poe said.
Her lawyer George Garcia yesterday presented to the media some of the evidence and documents presented to the Comelec to prove Poe’s residency in the Philippines since May 24, 2005.
“We have presented documents containing 400 pages to prove that she has been a resident of the Philippines since 2005,” Garcia said.
Poe’s counsel said their camp would raise in their motion for reconsideration to be filed at the Comelec on Monday that these documents and evidence were set aside and not tackled.
“No single evidence we presented was discussed,” he said noting that the Comelec relied on a single document which was the Certificate of Candidacy Poe filed at the Comelec for the 2013 elections.
Poe’s camp has been claiming that “an honest mistake” was committed and there was no deliberate intention to make a false statement.
The Comelec dismissing their evidence, Garcia said constitutes a grave abuse of discretion.
He noted that even the Comelec admitted that the question “Period of Residence in the Philippines before May 13, 2013,” in the COC was vague by changing its phrasing.
“They rephrased it so that no one will be confused how to compute their residency so they actually admitted that they are confusing,” Garcia said.
Meanwhile, Presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda said yesterday Poe should respect the rule of law and allow the judicial process to take its course regarding her disqualification from the 2016 presidential race.
Lacierda maintained that Poe’s camp had the right to exhaust all legal remedies available to appeal their case.
“I think as a candidate running for national elections, it is important for us to respect the rule of law. These are institutions ordained by the Constitution and (it) was ratified by the people. So, we can only ask everyone, all the candidates, to please respect the process and respect the rule of law,” Lacierda told reporters in a press briefing.