THE Partido ng Demokratikong Pilipino Lakas ng Bayan (PDP Laban), the party led by former president Rodrigo Duterte, on Monday filed a petition before the Supreme Court seeking an immediate manual recount of senatorial votes in the recently concluded 2025 midterm senatorial elections.
The PDP-Laban, led by National Vice Chairman Alfonso Cusi, cited in its motion what it described as “blatant and disturbing irregularities” that undermined the integrity of the automated voting process.
Reacting to the filing, Comelec Chairman George Garcia said the poll body welcomes efforts to test the integrity of the election system.
“We welcome these kinds of remedies before the Comelec to prove the real mandate of the electorate. We will just wait for the Supreme Court’s action on this matter,” Garcia said in a message to reporters.
Allegations
The motion for leave to file a supplemental petition for mandamus for the vote recount was filed by Israelito Torreon, the lawyer of Kingdom of Jesus Christ founder Apollo Quiboloy, a PDP Laban senatorial candidate who lost in the midterm elections, coming in at 31st place with 5,719,041 votes.
Quiboloy, detained on charges for various sex crimes that he has denied, first proposed a recount in May.
The PDP Laban petition alleged widespread failures in the automated voting system, saying, “more than 17 million senatorial votes were excluded in the official tally as ‘overvotes,’ despite voters carefully reviewing their ballots before submission.”
The document described frustrated citizens who “endured hours of queueing — whether packed into overcrowded, poorly ventilated precincts or waiting outside under the sweltering heat — only to have their ballots misread by the ACMs.”
The petitioners also cited “rampant mismatches between actual ballot and voter receipt” across both domestic and overseas voting.
Voters reportedly found that “the names of the senatorial candidates they actually voted for were not reflected on their voter receipts and instead, names not voted for appeared thereon.” This discrepancy was allegedly widespread enough to suggest systemic problems with vote recording.
The motion raised serious concerns about Comelec’s handling of election technology.
It said that while the Technical Evaluation Committee certified Version 3.4.0 of the vote-counting software, election machines actually ran Version 3.5.0 — an unauthorized update installed just days before the election.
This discrepancy, the petitioners argued, violated transparency protocols and potentially compromised the entire automated system.
The petition also claimed Comelec “hijacked” the transmission of election returns by redirecting data to an unlisted “Data Center 3” instead of sending it directly to transparency servers.
This maneuver, according to the motion, effectively “defeated the purpose of the transparency servers as they were denied direct and real-time access to raw precinct data.”
Even before votes were cast, the petition alleged Comelec engaged in questionable practices.
These include the discovery of election equipment like Starlink transmission devices and solar panels stored in a private Davao City residence, and the “undocumented destruction” of about 6 million ballots — incidents that petitioners said demonstrate mishandling of critical election materials.
At the heart of the petition is a demand to enforce Section 31 of RA 9369 (Election Automation Law), which mandates manual counting in cases of irregularities.
The motion argued this provision should be read alongside relevant sections of the Omnibus Election Code concerning recounts when “material defects, tampering, falsification, and discrepancies in the election returns” are suspected.
The Supreme Court must first decide whether to admit Torreon’s supplemental petition.
If granted, the case could lead to unprecedented judicial scrutiny of the 2025 election results and potentially affect the proclamation of winning senatorial candidates.
