Senatorial candidate Rodante Marcoleta has formally urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to allow the early proclamation of the top six senatorial candidates in the 2025 National and Local Elections.
In a four-page motion submitted Tuesday, Marcoleta’s camp cited his current 6th-place ranking with 14,895,858 votes, arguing that there is little chance the next six candidates could affect the standings of the top six.
“There is a statistical improbability that the next six candidates from 7th to 12th will no longer affect the standing of the first six candidates,” the motion stated.
Marcoleta’s team also called on Comelec to clarify the discrepancies noticed in his partial and unofficial vote counts. They attached timestamps indicating a drop in his tally from 15,001,038 votes at 1:32 a.m. to 12,244,219 at 2:11 a.m.
“Up to around five million votes of discrepancies from 12:23 a.m. to 4:03 a.m. of 13 May of 2025 were observed from Comelec’s transparency server,” the motion read.
Comelec earlier addressed these concerns, explaining that the discrepancies likely stemmed from the receiving parties’ systems, including media outlets, which may have failed to filter out duplicate transmissions from clustered precincts. Comelec Chairman George Garcia said this was a technical issue on the part of the data receivers, not with Comelec’s system.