Gloria Macapagal Arroyo looked on track for six more years as Philippine president, a pollster said yesterday, but her movie-star rival insisted he was winning and warned of counting irregularities.
The exit poll by Social Weather Stations (SWS) showed Arroyo taking 40 percent of the vote in Monday's national elections, ahead of action-movie hero Fernando Poe Jr with 32 percent.
The poll of 4,600 voters across the Philippines had a margin of error of 2 percent. Arroyo's margin of victory was slightly higher than in pre-election surveys by SWS and Pulse Asia, the country's other major pollster.
Poe, the gun-toting hero in 282 movies, had earlier expressed surprise he was trailing Arroyo in polls.
"We are ahead but the media are reporting the exact opposite. So I am appealing to the media to be fair and report the truth.
"This government should not use money and intimidate the nation," he told a news conference.
His camp was trying to organize a "victory rally" at a major intersection in the Makati business district during rush hour and asked supporters to show up in red, his campaign color.
Other early surveys suggested Monday's election was a tight race, raising the specter of more uncertainty for Filipinos and foreign investors already uneasy about corruption, huge debts, insurgencies, poverty and a weak economy.
The peso and stocks fell sharply, although that was partly in reaction to a global market slide on Monday.
The official count will take a month as teachers tally votes by hand and ballot boxes make a long journey from local polling stations to regional and national centers, with some officials bribed to alter the results along the way.
After a bitter three-month campaign, Arroyo and Poe had a uniform message about the need for vigilance against cheating and for the media to report the results accurately.
"All must now conduct themselves with prudence, sobriety and respect for the democratic process," Arroyo said.
If she wins, Arroyo gains her first real mandate to lead the largely Roman Catholic nation of 82 million after she rose into the job in 2001 in the second of two "people power" uprisings.
Arroyo, a 57-year-old US-trained economist and daughter of a former president, put down a brief mutiny by junior officers in Manila's financial district in July.
Despite 114 poll-related deaths since December, the military said the election was generally peaceful with no feared attacks by al-Qaeda-linked rebels or plots to disrupt the vote.
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