FINAL REPORT - Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

CONCLUSION
Massive electoral fraud, through cheating,
was committed through falsification of electoral
returns and certificates of canvass, made
directly possible through President Arroyo’s
use, through Garcillano, of Comelec, Cabinet
members, executive officials, and the military
One kind of cheating that was discovered involved the tampering of voting
results in electoral returns (or “ERs”) to switch victory in favor of President Arroyo
instead of (in favor of) Fernando Poe, Jr. This “technique” was discovered to have been
employed largely in the provinces of Pampanga, Cebu, Iloilo and Bohol (“PCIB”).
The other type of cheating was through the tampering of results in the
certificates of canvass (or “COCs”). This method was resorted to in Mindanao, most
glaringly in Lanao del Sur, when it developed that no matter the tampering of electoral
returns in the PCIB areas, Poe still had a clear winning margin, such that there was
need to offset and reverse these winning results through tampered results elsewhere.
In the reassuring words of Garcillano, “mag-compensate ‘yan sa Lanao”. 65
Both types of fraud were not discovered during the national canvass because
Congress limited examination of results to the contents of certificates of canvass,
refusing to open electoral returns despite repeated objections from the opposition and
simply noting the same instead.
Both types have been described by former NBI documents expert Segundo
Tabayoyong as belonging to the “second-generation” style of fraud, the first being the
kind that involves tampering directly with the root document, the ballot.
The cheating has turned out to be in the nature of tandem fraud, as both ERs
and COCs show that those tampered in favor of Arroyo had also been tampered in
favor of Noli De Castro.
As analyzed in the presentation of Hermenigildo Estrella, Jr., the uncanny
correspondence – between the conversations of President Arroyo and Garcillano in the
Garci Tapes and the voting results in the Mindanao provinces referred to in these
conversations – confirms the rigging of the PSOVs and COCs in the said areas, which
led to the net effect of more than a million fabricated votes in favor of President Arroyo,
in accordance with her desire, as she had expressly relayed to Garcillano, in the Garci
Tapes. 66
65
It is in Mindanao, specially Lanao del Sur, where historically, canvassing is deliberately delayed precisely to
accommodate cheating that will then allow tampered results to offset unwanted victories elsewhere.
66 No less than Comelec Commissioner Resurreccion Borra admitted at the Senate Committee hearing chaired by
Senator Biazon on April 3, 2006 that, “based on actual and empirical evidence,” there indeed occurred “massive
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