By MELVIN PURZUELO
Green Forum-Western Visayas

ILOILO CITY.— Less than two percent of votes remain uncanvassed in this city but election results have given commanding leads to Mayor Jerry Trenas who is running for congressman and Vice Mayor Jed Mabilog who is running for mayor. Both are running against former justice secretary Raul Gonzalez who is seeking the mayoralty and his son Raul Jr. who is seeking a congressional seat.

City Election Supervisor Robert Salazar, however, said the compact flash cards were erroneous and needed to be transferred to Manila and corrected.

He also reassured voters that the canvassed results which make up more than 98 percent of the clustered precincts will be printed and signed by election officials to make sure that these are not tampered with.

Supporters of Trenas and Mabilog, however, expressed fears that the powerful former justice secretary might try to influence the results of the voting.

“The defective CF cards will have to be corrected to reflect the actual votes garnered by the candidates,” said Salazar.

Hundreds of political supporters of Trenas and Mabilog blocked the doors of a canvassing center in this city Tuesday night to protect election results. Even media people were prevented from going out.

Earlier, Mabilog said that they will not allow election paraphernalia to be taken out of the canvassing center. By 2 a.m., however, after a standoff of more than eight hours, Trenas called on their supporters to go home, saying their lawyers will protect their votes.

With 98 percent of the votes canvassed, Trenas got 97,711 votes while the younger Gonzalez received 73,806 for the congressional position. For the mayoral race, Mabilog got 77,627 votes while the older Gonzalez received 62,938.

Earlier, Gonzalez’s camp had asked why 227 out of 344 PCOS machines in the city were not able to transmit the results on election day.

Lawyer Eugenio Original, who represented the Gonzalezes, said that “the CF cards were questionable because these were brought by the members of the Board of Election Inspectors and submitted to the canvassing board without watchers accompanying them.”

Lawyers for Trenas and Mabilog, on the other hand, claimed that Original was only trying to delay the proclamation of their bets.