THE Supreme Court, acting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, has dismissed for being moot the election protest filed by former Interior secretary Manuel Roxas II against former vice president Jejomar Binay seeking to nullify Binay’s proclamation in the 2010 vice presidential race.
High court spokesman Theodore Te said the Court dismissed Roxas’ protest and Binay’s counter-protest because the contested tenure of office of the vice president had already expired.
“It is a settled rule that courts refrain from deciding on moot cases because any decision that may be rendered there would have no practical or useful purpose and cannot be enforced,” Te told reporters.
The high court also ordered Vice President Leni Robredo and her losing rival Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to comment on the bid of the Commission on Elections to dispose of the election materials for this year’s elections pending the resolution of Marcos’ election protest against her.
The Court required Robredo and Marcos to comment on the letter filed by the poll body on Aug. 10 seeking the issuance of an order allowing it to “immediately conduct stripping activities for all the vote counting machines and consolidation and canvass system kits, including the disposal of the VCM [vote-counting machines] external batteries.”
Roxas and Binay ran for president in the presidential election in May but both lost to Rodrigo Duterte.
Binay had moved for the dismissal of the case in October last year when he and Roxas filed their certificates of candidacy for the presidency.
He said the high court should dump Roxas’ election protest because he had abandoned it. Roxas had also failed to pay the required filing fee amounting to P166,635,000.
Roxas believed he should have won the election if only the Comelec had counted the votes that had been declared null and void, which he said largely belonged to him and would have made him overtake Binay’s 727,084-vote advantage.