The camp of Liberal Party (LP) vice presidential bet Sen. Manuel Roxas II said Tuesday it is planning to file a protest before the presidential electoral tribunal so the almost three million nullified votes for vice president would be counted.

The Roxas camp had pushed for a random manual audit of the null votes for vice president because of the close race between the LP bet and Makati City Mayor Jejomar Binay. Roxas trailed Binay by some 600,000 votes last Monday night with only votes from Lanao del Sur yet to be reflected in the official canvass.

Joey Tenefrancia, counsel for Roxas, said that his camp would wait for the final report of the House joint canvassing committee “before

making any statement on the whole process.”

Tenefrancia said that they will have to study further Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile's advice for them to file an electoral protest to resolve the mystery on the high number of null votes for vice president. They would have to consult Roxas about such option first, he said.

“If ever, this (protest) would be for the almost 14 million Filipinos who voted for Senator Mar and for the voters whose voices were not reflected in the national canvass. This is also for all Filipinos because it is important that we would know the real tabulation of votes for the presidential race,” Tenefrancia said in a radio interview Tuesday, speaking in Filipino.

The Joint Canvassing Committee last Monday night turned down the Roxas camp's continuing motions to conduct a random manual audit of the null votes, and to check the electronic returns if these tally with the certificates of canvass (CoCs).

Tenefrancia said the around 2.6 million votes for vice president "could have possibly been not counted properly by the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines and were instead registered as null votes."

This developed as the House Suffrage and Electoral Reforms Committee concluded Tuesday its investigation on allegations that fraud attended this year’s election, as it acknowledged that the data it has received has sufficiently established the susceptibility of the automated election system to cheating.

Committee chairman Makati Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. adjourned the inquiry which began on May 18. He said that if there is one thing established during the hearing, it is the fact that the system is indeed open to cheating.

Thus he said that cheating during the last election could not be ruled out this early.

Locsin cited the admission by Smartmatic officials that broken compact flash (CF) cards could be reconfigured to read unused and scanned ballots fed in precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machine.

“They just said that you can zero the machine again and then you can vote re-scanned ballots. And the example I gave where [Parañaque Rep. Roilo] Golez and I, supposed we were running against each other, I opened the ballot box, I throw away half of his ballots, and I keep most of mine. On top of which, maybe I can use unused ballots and shade that or better than that I overvote his ballot. And apparently, if you have control of the precinct, you can do it,” he said.

But Locsin said that though the system is prone to cheating, Smartmatic people have been able to prove that cheating under an automated system would always leave traces.

Also, Acting Justice Secretary Alberto Agra said that they have already requested the United States Embassy for assistance to invoke Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) to determine who uploaded the “Hello Nico” conversation.

Agra said that the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) has already traced the website where the conversation was uploaded. “The website was already traced but once it opened, we were diverted to other site apparently Germany (site). It was apparently US-based website so we are asking help of the US through MLAT.”

He said that they have already written the US Embassy about the request.

Agra said a copy of the compact disc (CD) containing the alleged wiretapped phone conversation between Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Ronaldo Puno and Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer had already been turned over to NBI Director Nestor Mantaring.

Both Puno and Ferrer denied that they were the persons in the phone conversation. The wiretapped phone conversation circulated in the Internet.

Meanwhile, more than 250,000 votes were excluded from the canvass because of the lowering of thresholds implemented by the Commission on Elections for the transmission of certain provincial CoCs to the national server; and because of the erroneous transmission of certain precincts of the final testing and sealing (FTS) mock votes instead of the real votes cast on May 10, he said. (with report from Hannah Torregoza and Jeamma Sabate)