When presidential election winner Noynoy Aquino assumes the top post of the land at 12 noon of June 30, his Senate seat will be empty.  Since senator Panfilo Lacson is nowhere to be found, a total of two seats will effectively be vacant when the next Congress reopens in July. As such, there will only be 22 senators in the 24-seat Senate.
 
This being the case, it should make sense for the COMELEC to proclaim 13 or even 14 winners in the recently concluded senatorial race to complete the Senate, with the 13th and possibly 14th placers serving out only the remaining three years of Aquino and Lacson.
 
The replacement senator(s) would be eligible to run for reelection only once, in 2013, for a maximum total of nine consecutive years, in compliance with the two-term limit.
 
There are possibilities we discussed over family dinner at home. The lawyers, the COMELEC, Congress and the Supreme Court can certainly pursue it, or shoot it down with one edict.
 
24-seat Senate provision
 
I admit I don’t know the procedural or legal questions that may make this option possible or impossible. But I am certain that the Constitution mandates that the Senate be composed of 24 senators elected at large.
 
Can the results of the May 2010 election serve the intended effect of holding a “special election” contemplated in the constitution to replace a vacancy? This will spare the country the cost and the agony of conducting a separate election. At the same time, it will help realize the constitutional provision on 24 senators.
 
Notably, the Constitution only uses the word MAY, as in “may hold a special election.” It didn’t use SHALL. As far as I know my English, the word “MAY” makes the situation open to other possibilities.
 
First-time situation
 
No situation like this has happened before.  Before martial law, senators and presidents served concurrent four-year terms. The presidents after Cory were not incumbent senators when they ran. Ramos was defense secretary, Erap was vice-president, and Gloria was already president when elected to the presidency. No vacancy occurred as a result of election results. It’s a first-time situation. It can be a test case.
 
It wasn’t prudent for COMELEC to declare beforehand a 13th seat open since not all of the nine presidential candidates are senators. Were Erap decisively leading the race, there wouldn’t be any 13th seat to consider. But a Noynoy, Villar or Jamby victory would lead to the vacancy as they are all incumbent senators with three years to go.
 
Now that the situation has arisen, the COMELEC and Congress should at least consider the option. There are scores of committees in the Senate that would need chairs and members. A full slate of 24 persons can give more attention to the various concerns of the Senate – whether policy-related or investigative.
 
Missing senators
 
As it is, incarcerated Senator Antonio Trillanes IV is unable to attend legislative sessions or sit in committees, although he functions in some other way and actually spends his allocated budget. So three seats in all will be physically vacant should no replacement be made for Noynoy and should Lacson not return soon.
 
Lacson’s seat would have to be formally declared vacant first before a 14th seat is made available. The Senate itself would have to do this through a vote of at least two-thirds of incumbent members in favor of Lacson’s expulsion. Or Lacson can voluntarily resign from office. 
 
Ideally, Lacson should have resigned earlier or the Senate shouldn’t have waited any longer to bring the voluntarily disappeared senator to task before the election campaign period so that the opening for the 13th seat could have been set from the start.
 
Noy-Mar prevailed
 
Meanwhile, the NoyMar tandem is leading the race in the Western and Central Visayas and the CARAGA regions (or Regions 6, 7 and 13). On the other hand,  the Erap-Binay combination is prevailing in Cagayan Valley, Northern Mindanao, Davao and SoCCKSARGEN (Regions 2, 10, 11 and 12). But the NoyBi tandem leads in eight, or majority of the regions.
 
However, contrary to what most people think, Binay benefitted primarily from the “ErapBi” tandem and only in a small way from the “NoyBi” vote configuration. How so?
 
Binay’s running tally is only about 800,000 votes higher than Roxas’s. This means he was able to cut at most 6 percent from Noynoy’s constituency (800T is about 6 percent of 13.5 million Noynoy votes) that should have gone to Roxas. The current gap between Noynoy’s and Roxas’s votes is about 1.2 million. We can conclude that some 400,000 Noynoy supporters voted for some other vice-presidential candidate other than Binay.
 
Binay’s votes
 
So where did Binay get his votes? Assuming all Erap supporters also voted for Binay, about 8.7 million votes of Binay’s votes can already be accounted for (8.7 million is the running tally of Erap’s votes). But Binay so far has about five million more votes than Erap. Where did the balance of approximately 4.2 million Binay votes come from?
 
They came most likely from the approximately 2.9 million people who voted for Gibo Teodoro but not for Edu Manzano (2.9M is the gap between the votes of Gibo and Edu). A secondary source is the 1.2 million more people who voted for Villar but not for Loren.
 
Eddie Villanueva also contributed about 700,000 of his supporters’ votes to other VP candidates since he got this much more votes than his running mate Perfecto Yasay.  Jamby doesn’t count since she had no running mate for vice-president.  Bayani Fernando, on the other hand, got more votes than presidential bet Richard Gordon, as did Dominador Chipeco over JC de los Reyes. The two VP candidates have earned almost million votes combined   These were potential votes that were lost to Roxas or Binay but they are significant given that the margin between Roxas and Binay is less than 1 million. 
 
In all, the Noy-Mar votes dominated all other tandems in terms of sheer number of votes. The vaunted appeal of “NoyBi” is a myth. Let’s not give too much credit to Chiz Escudero, the partylist Ladlad, and the faction of the Coryistas who supported Binay. Binay should thank Gibo’s and Villar’s supporters instead. 
 
*I based my figures from the electronic data maps prepared by Cybersoft Infomatics for the Philippine Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting. The running tallies were computed from about 90 percent of election returns.
 
  E-mal: mcf178@yahoo.com