PROCLAIMED Rosales, Pangasinan Vice Mayor John Isaac Kho is seeking intervention from the Commission on Elections after a Regional Trial Court issued a ruling voiding the Automated Counting Machine (ACM) results in the May 12, 2025 elections.
Kho has filed an urgent petition before the Comelec to restrain enforcement of the RTC Branch 53.
In a decision dated Nov. 24, 2025, the RTC reversed Kho’s proclamation despite his 1,208-vote lead based on official ACM returns, which showed 20,201 votes for Kho. The court credited a manual recount.
The RTC said it relied on the physical ballots as the “best and most conclusive evidence” of voter intent and questioned the reliability of the ACMs, citing discrepancies between machine-generated election returns and the ballots manually appreciated.
“The automated counting machines did not accurately read and count the votes cast,” the decision stated, noting complaints that some Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) receipts did not match votes cast.
“If discrepancies like this can happen in Pangasinan, where else could ACM results be questioned? This contradicts earlier statements by COMELEC Chairman George Garcia that the 2025 elections achieved a 99.997% accuracy rate,” Kho said.
To address his concerns, Kho filed a motion seeking the decryption and printing of ballot images stored in the ACMs’ secure data devices, arguing that comparing digital images with physical ballots is a vital safeguard under election rules.
Kho maintained that denying access to the ballot images prevents him from presenting critical evidence to prove tampering.
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