HRET upholds election win of Northern Samar Rep. Paul Daza

The House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal (HRET) has upheld the election of Paul Daza as the winner of the congressional election in the first district of Northern Samar.

In a resolution promulgated on December 12, 2019 but was only relayed to the media on Thursday, the HRET unanimously dismissed the electoral protest of Harlin Abayon against Daza.

The provincial board of canvassers proclaimed Daza as the winner in the congressional elections with a total overall margin of 59,685 against Abayon.

But in his protest, Abayon wanted to annul the election results in five of the 14 municipalities of the district, claiming vote-buying. In those five municipalities alone, Daza had already gotten 36,875 more votes than Abayon.

In the HRET resolution penned by Supreme Court Associate Justice Andres Reyes Jr. concurred by the rest of the nine-person tribunal, Abayon's protest was dismissed without further proceedings "for being insufficient in form and substance."

The court said that even "assuming arguendo" or "for the sake of argument" that it annuls the election results of the five municipalities and deduct Daza's margin of 36,875 votes from his overall margin of 59,685 votes, he would still win the polls by a margin of 22,810 votes.

The tribunal also said that even if Abayon was claiming incidents of vote-buying in the five municipalities, he was only able to identify witnesses in two of them.

Apart from Reyes, the HRET is composed of Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen as chair and Associate Justice Reyes, along with six members of the House of Representatives namely Representatives Salvador Leachon, Vincent Garcia, Lawrence Fortun, Alfredo Garbin Jr., Resurreccion Acop, and Abdullah Dimaporo. — RSJ, GMA News