Your Honors, Justices of the Supreme Court: Restore the Vote of Manila’s 6th District

Hurrying to get to Manila from  a meeting in Makati, I groaned when I realized the Grab car I was riding had taken a “short cut” through Sta. Ana, Manila. It has been raining a good half hour when the car began crawling through this flood prone area. Resigned to endure the next hour sitting in traffic, I slunk back deep into my seat as the car waded through one of Sta. Ana’s many frequently flooded roads.

I would have fallen asleep had I not felt the slosh of dark, stinking water through the car’s floor. It was at that moment that leptospirosis became very real — no longer just words and images on a screen. The gurgles and wet slaps beneath my seat set the old news hound in me whimpering. I’d read the report: forty people dead from the disease. All it took was the thought of becoming number forty-one. So much for my glacial detachment. It boiled off into a heavy fog of panic.

I asked myself how the people who control billions of pesos in public money could let this keep happening. It’s not as if they don’t know. Anyone can see that without proper flood control, the people of Santa Ana are doomed to the same floods and the same diseases, year after year.

Nobody should need a billboard to warn them of a danger the river has been announcing for centuries. (Then again, who know? Maybe living in a P500 million mansion far away causes blindness, narcolepsy, and dementia.)

Santa Ana sits in a crook of the Pasig River’s serpentine path, packed tight with houses and buildings, in Manila’s 6th District. Long before the Spaniards came, it was the seat of the kingdom of Namayan, and the Spaniards later named the town Santa Ana de Sapa, Santa Ana “of the stream.” For centuries the land has been telling its people the same thing: you live with water, and the water always comes back. Every flooded street is proof that the people who govern us keep forgetting it.

The flood wasn’t the only thing on my mind as we crawled through it. Through the window, I watched people drenched in rainwater and sweat, fighting to keep the flood out of their homes with sandbags and buckets. They made me think of my friends who live just a few streets away. I could almost hear the hurt in their voices when they told me their stories, every one of them about hope being swept away.

They told me about the long wait on May 13, 2025, outside the canvassing center, and I can picture it. The warm air clung to their skin like soft wax, and they paced so much they could have run a marathon. Then came the final tally, read from a sheet of paper bearing every mark of authority. The words were noise until they caught, “Joey Uy… 64,746 votes…” Cheers and shouts drowned out the rest: “Benny Abante… 63,358…” It was a margin of 1,388, not a landslide, but solid ground.

My friends celebrated the way ordinary people do on the rare days life lets them win. When the news showed up on their social media feeds, it confirmed they hadn’t slipped on a mossy sidewalk, hit their heads, and dreamed the whole thing. COMELEC proclaimed Uy the winner. On May 26, he took his oath as the district’s congressman before Manila Regional Trial Court Executive Judge Carolina Icasiano-Sison. The certificate was signed and the oath was sworn. The ground felt dry.

But the water had already started rising. Four days before the oath, on May 22, Abante had filed a petition with COMELEC claiming Uy was not a natural-born Filipino. Uy was given five days to answer. On June 18, COMELEC’s Second Division ruled against him, reasoning that his mother had lost her citizenship when she married a Chinese national. On June 30, the day the Constitution says a new congressman’s term begins, the COMELEC en banc annulled his proclamation and declared the candidate with fewer votes the winner. Uy filed a petition with the Supreme Court that same day.

It took six weeks for the seat to go from certified, to sworn, to washed out. Like every flood in Santa Ana, it came in stages, and by the time anyone noticed, it was already over everyone’s ankles.

My friends don’t feel like they lost an election. They feel robbed.

They had lined up under the sun, voted for a man they’d known for years as their councilor, and watched him take his oath. Then a commission none of them elected told them their votes came down to a paperwork problem.

Nobody knocked on their doors to ask. Nobody explained. Their choice was simply undone, the way you’d strike a typo from a document. The curses came fast, in the kind of Tagalog this site won’t print, and every one of them was aimed at COMELEC.

Then came the stories. Everyone who has spent time around Manila politics has heard them: seats said to be for sale, rulings said to bend toward whoever has the right friends, envelopes that change hands where no camera can see. My friends told them the way people tell ghost stories, half-believing them and fully angry. I can’t verify any of it, and I’m not saying it happened here. But when an institution makes its biggest decisions behind closed doors, after the votes are in, it shouldn’t be surprised when the people it overrules assume the worst. That kind of distrust isn’t paranoia. It’s what secrecy produces. My friends’ anger is the bill for that secrecy, and COMELEC hasn’t paid it.

I understood their anger because I’ve seen this before from the inside. In 2016, I was on Grace Poe’s presidential campaign when COMELEC disqualified her over citizenship and residency. The Supreme Court reversed that ruling, and her name stayed on the ballot. Different case, same question: how much power should an appointed commission have to override what voters decide, or are about to decide?

To answer that fairly, we have to look at what COMELEC actually ruled. Uy was born in 1962 to a Chinese father and a mother who was born Filipina. Under the 1935 Constitution in force at the time, a child like him could claim natural-born status through his mother. COMELEC closed that door by ruling that his mother was no longer Filipino when he was born, having lost her citizenship through her marriage.

On the law, COMELEC’s theory has substance. Under Commonwealth Act No. 63, a Filipina who married a foreigner lost her citizenship if her husband’s country’s law gave her his nationality, and Chinese law of that era generally did. But in Philippine courts, foreign law is a fact that must be proven like any other, and the burden falls on the one who alleges it. The House Electoral Tribunal has applied that rule to cases much like this one, refusing to presume that a Filipina became Chinese simply by marrying a Chinese man. Uy’s petition points out that Abante never cited the specific law and never proved that Uy’s mother acquired Chinese citizenship.

Consider, then, the evidence on which a district’s vote was overturned.

It was a set of photocopied immigration certificates from 1967, issued when Uy was five years old, and handed in by a “concerned citizen” nobody would name.

Our Rules on Evidence are not obscure on this point. A government record must be proven by the original or by a copy certified by the office that keeps it. In *Matugas v. COMELEC* (2004), the Supreme Court refused to accept an uncertified photocopy as proof of a public record.

According to Uy’s petition, these papers carried no certification.

No custodian vouched for them.

No named person stood behind them.

Uy asked for a hearing to challenge them. COMELEC ruled without one.

A man was stripped of a seat sixty-four thousand people gave him, on paper a first-year law student would object to, and he was never allowed to ask where it came from.

Even if COMELEC were right about his mother, Uy has a fallback, because the Supreme Court has faced almost exactly this situation before. In *Co v. HRET* (1991), Jose Ong Jr. had a Filipina mother and a father naturalized when Ong was a boy.

The Court held that voting and taking part in elections count as electing citizenship, and that demanding a formal election from someone the law had already made a citizen would be absurd.

Uy’s father was naturalized when Uy was five, and like Ong, who had won a seat in Congress, Uy spent his life acting as a citizen: born and raised in Manila, schooled here, a regular voter, and a councilor for several terms.

His petition adds one more argument: once he had taken his oath and assumed office, only the House Electoral Tribunal could rule on his qualifications. More than a year later, the Supreme Court has yet to decide, and Abante holds the seat. On the law and the evidence, Uy has the stronger case.

Whichever way the Court rules on citizenship, the case exposes a deeper problem, and it isn’t a missing rule. The rule already exists.

Section 78 of the Omnibus Election Code says a petition to cancel a candidate’s certificate of candidacy must be filed within 25 days of its filing, and decided no later than 15 days before the election. The law’s purpose is exactly what my friends needed: settle a candidate’s eligibility before people vote.

Uy filed his certificate on October 1, 2024, so the deadline to challenge it passed on October 26. Nobody did.

Abante filed his petition on May 22, 2025, seven months late, after the election and after Uy’s proclamation. According to Uy’s petition, COMELEC took it up anyway by docketing it as a “Special Case,” a category meant for disputes that arise before proclamation.

The commission that is supposed to referee elections did not follow its own rulebook, and the people who paid for it were sixty-four thousand voters in a district that floods every rainy season.

The same lack of scrutiny covers the other half of COMELEC’s power. The commission runs the Automated Election System largely on its own. Every cycle brings reports of failed machines, corrupted SD cards, and transmission problems; in 2019, results stalled for about seven hours. Each incident gets explained and forgotten until the next election. Congress has little appetite to dig deeper, since few lawmakers want a fight with the agency that will referee their next race.

The fix starts with enforcement, not new legislation. Late petitions under Section 78 should be dismissed outright, as the law already intends, and Congress can remove any doubt by making that dismissal mandatory. Any proceeding that can undo a proclamation should require a full hearing with properly authenticated evidence. Beyond that, the Automated Election System should face an independent, regular audit with published findings, and COMELEC’s own powers should undergo a periodic structural review, carried out by people who don’t need its goodwill.

By the time my Grab car made it out of Santa Ana, the water was already starting to drain, leaving behind a skin of mud on the pavement and on the doorsteps of the houses that hadn’t kept it out. That’s what floods do. They recede, and people pretend it won’t happen again. My friends in the 6th District know better. They lined up, they voted, they celebrated, and they watched their choice wash away. Whatever the Supreme Court decides about Joey Uy, it shouldn’t take a petition for certiorari to keep a district’s vote from going under.

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Editor’s note (October 2026): This article has been revised. It now draws on Joey Uy’s petition before the Supreme Court (G.R. No. 280887), corrects details of the case timeline, presents both sides of the citizenship question more fully, and removes anecdotes that could not be independently verified.