The Philippine Online Chronicles

The National Board of Canvassers (NBC) made up of panels from both the Senate and the House of Representatives will not be considering “null votes” during the canvassing of ballots for president and vice president.

This is inspite of the motion by Liberal Party vice-presidential candidate Senator Mar Roxas for the board to conduct a comprehensive review of more than 3 million null votes for possible inclusion in the count.

Ballots which were improperly shaded, or had more than one name shaded for president or vice president, is considered "null" and will not be counted. According to Roxas’s party however, many of the null votes should have been votes for him.

“The public controversy regarding the number of ‘null votes,’ which were not read by PCOS [Precinct Count Optical Scan] machines, allegedly numbering more than a million votes for president and an allegedly whopping 2.6 million for vice president, won’t be considered by the Joint Canvass Committee,” said House Speaker Prospero Nograles.

According to Nograles, it is “beyond the function” of NBC to determine whether null votes should be included as their duty is only to canvass the accepted votes. He added that Roxas, who in the last count was around half a million votes behind the current vice-presidential race leader Jejomar Binay, should bring up the issue with the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET).

Binay’s lawyer, on the other hand, has said that null votes are a “non-issue.” Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III pointed out that there were around 5 million null votes in the 2004 elections, but this was not considered an anomaly.

The official canvass results as of 2:27 p.m. on Thursday showed that LP standard-bearer Noynoy Aquino retained the lead with 12,735,059 votes, with Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino (PMP) bet and former president Joseph Estrada coming in second with 8,142,527. In the vice presidential race, Binay kept the lead with 12,208,562 against Roxas, who came in with 11,736,878.