FINAL REPORT - Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

The Commission on Elections has admitted that it overprinted
32,000 sets of these ERs before the elections. It has not explained
fully what happened to these excess ERs. It is believed that these
were the same fake ERs used by the cheating team. It was a
systematic, well-financed, well-managed and well-supervised operation
by professional cheaters, Legarda and Tabayoyong said.
The cheaters, however, made mistakes. And that gave them away. ERs
supposedly coming from areas thousands of kilometers apart were filled
in by the same hands, said Tabayoyong. The vertical tally bars ("taras")
used to mark the votes on the ERs were written very neatly and not in
the uneven manner when written in the precincts because of stress and
haste. There are columns where there are totals of votes but no bars.
There are totals that do not tally with the bars. Thumb marks used to
close the columns -- so no new bars could be added afterwards-were
small, purposely smudged to make identification impossible. Required
signatures were missing. Some had only initials instead of signatures.
Of the approximately 5,000 ERs analyzed, 3,000 were found to be
spurious.
The analysis also showed that the team gave De Castro an average of a
70-vote margin over Legarda, and Ms Arroyo, a 100-vote margin over
Poe. Therefore, the 32,000 sets of overprinted ERs could translate to a
vote-margin rate of approximately 2.1 million votes in the Legarda-De
Castro contest and around 3 million votes in the Poe-Arroyo race. Thus,
De Castro and Ms Arroyo had something like 2 million votes and 3
million votes, respectively, for "insurance." Even if their rivals won in
other areas, the insurance votes made sure Ms Arroyo and De Castro
won in the totals.” (“As I See It: How cheating was done in 2004 polls,”
Neal H. Cruz, first posted 00:34am (Mla time) Sept 28, 2005, Inquirer
News Service; emphasis supplied)
Members of the political opposition in the House of course attempted to expose,
during the national canvassing, the foregoing fact of egregious electoral fraud in favor
of President Arroyo, but were – as in the impeachment proceedings – rebuffed, for no
legal reason – by the administration bloc.
The House Minority Report has placed the following on record:
“Against the backdrop of the aforementioned events 38 , the Joint
Committee proceeded to determine the authenticity and due execution of
the certificates of canvass referred to it and preliminarily canvass the
votes cast for presidential and vice-presidential candidates. In the
course of these proceedings before the Joint Committee, the Minority
38
referring to questionable Comelec decisions such as the gigantic increase of registered voters from 33 million in
2001 to 43 million in 2004, the overprinting of three (3) million ballots and thirty-three thousand (33,000) election
returns which have remained unaccounted for, the sub-contracting of printing jobs to private entities, etc.
111