It’s true! She can’t accept that she lost!
Refusing to accept defeat, former lawmaker Stella Quimbo has filed an election protest against Marikina City Mayor Maan Teodoro, alleging irregularities, anomalies, and fraud.
Teodoro won the 2025 mayoral race by 31,394 votes after garnering 142,814 votes compared to Quimbo’s 111,420 votes.
In her Aug. 8, 2025 memorandum, Quimbo alleged that the election was marred by malfunctioning and misreading of Automated Counting Machines (ACMs), blatant vote buying, and ballots from priority polling precincts that were not fed into the ACMs and counted.
“As a consequence of the malfunctioning and misreading of the ballots, a total of at least 1,672 votes cast for Mayor were not read and counted by the ACMs,” Quimbo claimed.
“Aside from these, valid ballots containing votes for protestant Quimbo were also rejected and not counted in her favor,” the memorandum stated, adding the “incidents cast doubt on the integrity of the results of the election for mayor.”
Quimbo also cited instances where the Electoral Board forgot to feed into the ACM 56 ballots used in the Priority Polling Precinct.
“To say that these incidents undermined the true will of the electorate is an understatement. Had these ballots been counted, the result of the election for Mayor would have been different,” she said.
In addition to the technical issues, Quimbo claimed that Department of Education personnel exhibited suspicious behavior. In one instance, the principal of Parang Elementary School suddenly asked for a meeting during the scheduled preliminaries to voting and before the opening of the precincts for early voting.
“As a consequence, there was no one to witness whether the ACMs had zero votes before the start of voting,” she said.
In some cases, Quimbo’s supporters and pollwatchers were asked to leave the precinct, while a voter was stopped from casting a vote even though it was not yet 7 p.m.
Backing up her claim of irregularity and fraud, Quimbo said an unidentified man was seen entering a precinct at the Malanday Elementary School with a pre-shaded ballot, while another man was spotted while inserting a USB in the ACM without authority.
Quimbo requested the Commission to issue an order directing the immediate collection and retrieval of all ballot boxes from the 363 merged/clustered precincts used in the recent elections and undertaking a recount, revision, and reappreciation of ballots and due examination of election documents.
