G.R. No. 204828 - Regio vs. Commission on Elections

In the October 25, 2010 barangay elections held in Barangay 296, Zone 28, District III, City of Manila, Jaime C. Regio and Ronnie C. Co, among other candidates, vied for the position of punong barangay.
The original vote count from seven clustered precincts showed Regio with 478 votes and Co with 336 votes, based on the Statement of Votes.

On November 4, 2010, Ronnie C. Co filed an election protest before the Metropolitan Trial Court (MeTC), Branch 4 in Manila.
Co alleged multiple irregularities including:

Failure of the Board of Election Tellers (BET) to permit his supporters to vote properly;
Allowance for “flying voters” to cast votes; and
Misreading, miscounting, and misappreciation of ballots due to non-adherence to established COMELEC resolutions (specifically COMELEC Resolution No. 9030).

Additional allegations by Co included claims of vote-buying by Regio and the distribution of sample ballots within polling centers during the elections.
Co initially protested seven clustered precincts but later excluded two (CP Nos. 1304A and 1305A) from his protest.

The trial court allowed the revision of ballots during a preliminary conference, which took place on January 13–14, 2011.
The revision committee report presented revised vote counts showing:

Co obtained increased votes across the precincts from 336 (original count) to a higher total as per the physical count in the revision;
Regio’s vote total was also revised but remained lower than Co’s count in the affected precincts.

During the revision, Co limited his evidence solely to the committee’s report while Regio maintained that any discrepancies were the product of post-election tampering and operatory errors.

The MeTC, in its May 4, 2011 Decision, dismissed Co’s protest and affirmed Regio as the duly-elected punong barangay, grounding its ruling on:

The presumption that election returns are genuine and the vote-counting procedures were properly followed;
The requirement that before the revision ballots could override the official vote count, there must be convincing evidence that these ballots were preserved without tampering.

The COMELEC First Division, in its Resolution dated August 23, 2011, dismissed Co’s appeal citing similar reasoning that:

There was a lack of sufficient evidence to overcome the presumption of regularity; and
The discrepancies could not alone establish misreading, miscounting, and misappreciation of ballots without additional independent evidence.

On December 7, 2012, the COMELEC En Banc reconsidered the August 23, 2011 Resolution and reversed the earlier decision, declaring Co as the duly-elected punong barangay on the basis that:

The revision ballots were found to be genuine and there was no evidence of tampering from the time of counting to storage.
The discrepancy between the election returns and the revised count might have been due to clerical errors during canvassing rather than intentional tampering.

The Commission committed grave abuse of discretion by favoring the results of the revision over the official canvassing results; and
The required evidence of actual tampering was never satisfactorily presented to justify discarding the official count.

Whether the respondent COMELEC committed grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess of jurisdiction by ruling that Ronnie C. Co had successfully discharged the burden of proving that the integrity of the ballots subjected to revision was preserved.
Whether the COMELEC, in reversing the decision of its First Division and declaring Co as the duly-elected punong barangay, erred in giving primacy to the revision results over the official vote count and canvassing results, thereby committing grave abuse of discretion.