The head of the congressional panel canvassing the votes for president and vice president vowed on Friday to expedite their task so that the new President and Vice President of the Philippines will be proclaimed days before June 30 when President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's term expires. Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile made the pledge as the joint congressional National Board of Canvassers (NBOC) he co-chairs started officially counting the votes for president and vice president cast during the May 10 elections. Enrile said he will not allow the congressional canvassing to drag on, warning that failure to proclaim a new president and vice president before June 30 could spark chaos. “I will not take a chance that I will proclaim the winning president and vice president on the very day of June 30,” Enrile said in a radio interview. “I do not want to inflict chaos on our country. I've given so much to this country to allow this to be destroyed,” said the senator who won a fresh six-year term in the Senate in the last elections. Enrile said he and his co-chairman, House Speaker Prospero Nograles, would want to proclaim the new president and vice president by June 15. The NBOC earlier agreed to canvass first the votes cast by overseas Filipinos workers (OFWs) which were mostly done manually in various places worldwide. Liberal Party (LP) standard-bearer Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III and his running mate Senator Mar Roxas posted huge leads in the overseas absentee voting in at least five countries -- Laos, Guam, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, and Thailand – where the first batch of manually counted and transmitted certificates of canvass (CoCs) were tallied on Thursday night. There were a total of 124 manually transmitted COCs from overseas voting while two – from Hong Kong and Singapore - were electronically counted and transmitted. As of 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Aquino garnered a total 2,014 votes while Roxas took 1,920. Nacionalista Party (NP) bet Senator Manuel Villar came next to Aquino with 585 votes while Lakas-Kampi-CMD candidate, former Defense Secretary Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro, took third place with 548 votes. NP vice presidential bet, Senator Loren Legarda followed Roxas with 855 votes while Makati City Mayor Jejomar Binay was at third place with 642 votes. Even with only a few of the overseas ballots counted so far, Binay said he was conceding defeat to Roxas – but only in the overseas voting.
