Editor’s Note: This fact check was originally published on election day, May 12, 2025. Sonny Trillanes lost to incumbent Caloocan City mayor Along Malapitan.
A post on Facebook (FB) is erroneously claiming that former senator Antonio Trillanes IV is leading the mayoral race for Caloocan City. This is not true.
At 12:21 p.m. during the May 12 midterm polls, an FB user published the post with the this false claim in its caption:
“TRILLANES, Nangunguna sa halalan 2025 (leads in [ABS-CBN’s] Halalan 2025). Unofficial Results: [Link to an external website]”
The post showed a screenshot allegedly taken from ABS-CBN’s Halalan 2025 election tracker, which featured Trillanes supposedly getting over 1.7 million votes in his bid as Caloocan City mayor.
The screenshot is fake. An archived copy of the ABS-CBN Halalan 2025 website taken at 1 p.m. showed that no votes have been transmitted yet.
The link to the “unofficial results” in the FB post also led to an e-commerce website – which is a huge red flag.
Commission on Elections chairperson George Garcia said in a press briefing that the automated counting machines may only start transmitting votes at exactly 7 p.m. in the evening and no earlier than that time.
As of May 22, over a week after the midterm polls, the Halalan 2025 website shows Trillanes in second place for the mayoralty race, defeated by Along Malapitan who got 348,211 votes against Trillanes’ 229,512.
The FB user’s post has since been taken down.
