Millions of Filipinos yesterday braved long lines and soaring temperatures to vote in a midterm election seen as choosing sides in an explosive feud between Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and impeached Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte.
With temperatures hitting 34°C in some places, George Garcia, head of the Philippine Commission on Elections, said some voting machines were “overheating.”
“It’s slowing the voting process,” he told reporters at a prison in southern Manila where inmates were casting ballots.
Photo: AFP
“Due to the extreme heat, the ink [on the ballots] does not dry immediately and the ballot ends up stuck on the scanners,” Garcia said, adding that officials in some areas were resorting to aiming electric fans at the machines.
Yesterday’s election was to decide more than 18,000 posts, from seats in the Philippine House of Representatives to hotly contested municipal offices, but it was the battle for the Philippine Senate that carries potentially major implications for the presidential election in 2028.
The 12 senators chosen nationally would form half the jury in an impeachment trial of Duterte later this year that could see her permanently barred from public office.
Duterte’s long-running feud with former ally Marcos erupted in February when she was impeached by the House of Representatives for alleged “high crimes,” including corruption and an assassination plot against the president.
Barely a month later, her father — former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte — was arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face a charge of crimes against humanity over his deadly drug crackdown.
Yesterday, 53-year-old Roland Agasa, one of the nation’s 68 million registered voters, said the feud had taken a mental toll heading into election day.
“The government is getting stressful,” he said outside a Manila elementary school where the polling station was on the fourth and fifth floors.
“I hope we choose the deserving, those who can help the country,” Agasa said, adding that he planned to wait until the day cooled before braving the stairs to cast his vote.
“There was no pushing, but it was cramped. It was difficult, but we endured so that we could vote,” Rizza Bacolod, 32, said at the same school.
Marcos cast his vote at an elementary school in his family’s traditional stronghold of Ilocos Norte province. His mother Imelda, 95, was at his side.
Sara Duterte, who cast her vote at a high school in her family’s southern bailiwick of Davao, needed nine votes in the 24-seat Senate to preserve any hope of a future presidential run.
Heading into yesterday, seven of the candidates polling in the top 12 were endorsed by Marcos, while four were aligned with the vice president.
Two, including the president’s independent-minded sister Imee Marcos, were “adopted” as honorary members of the Duterte family’s PDP-Laban party on Saturday.
The move to add Imee Marcos and television personality Camille Villar to the party’s slate was intended to add “more allies to protect the vice president against impeachment,” according to a party resolution.
Despite his detention at The Hague, Rodrigo Duterte remains on the ballot in Davao, where he is seeking to retake his former job as mayor.
A day before the election, at least two people were killed in a clash between supporters of rival political camps in southern Mindanao island’s autonomous Muslim region, the Philippine army said.
An official at the Basilan province disaster office in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region put the death toll at four.
The Philippines has a history of violent elections, especially in the restive south, where armed clashes between groups of political rivals are common.
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