Aquino is majority President: 40% of 37.5 million voters supported Aquino

The first ever automated voting was relatively a success. However, the first ever canvassing of electronic results are turning slow.

COMELEC announced that only 75% of the 50 million registered voters were able to cast their votes. That is about 37.5 million votes cast. The lower turnout was caused by technical glitches and longer queus.

As of 6:41 AM, today, May 11, 2010, Liberal party standard bearer Senator Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III still leads the pack of presidential hopefuls with 12,233,002 votes, 4.48 million votes bigger than former president Joseph Estrada's 7,749,597 and about 7.90 million votes from Manny Villar's 4,329,215 votes.

Gilbert Teodoro  has 3,243,688 votes. Eddie Villanueva 916,543, Richard Gordon 431,954, Nicanor Perlas 42,205, Jamby Madrigal 37,119 and JC de los Reyes 34,833

With about 30,431,735 of the expected 37.5 million already counted, or 81.1% of all votes cast, it seems that it is still possible for Estrada to catch up with Aquino. However, if current trends remain, with about 40.1% of the votes going to Aquino, and only about 25-26% for Estrada, then, it is very safe to presume that Aquino will clinch this and becomes the second majority president post-Marcos era.

Villar, the biggest spender in this elections (estimated to have spent close to 3 billion pesos) is a poor third, with just 14.2% of the votes. As what I wrote in previous posts, this is the natural constituency of Villar. As I said, Villar will lose this elections if Estrada successfully recovers the territories Villar snatched from him. This just shows that money is not the end all and be all in an elections.

IN our democracies, the losing contenders will have surely declared defeat and rallied behind Aquino by this time. I expect that from JC delos Reyes, Nicanor Perlas, Jamby Madrigal, Richard Gordon and Gilbert Teodoro. These gentlemen and fine lady should accept defeat now and rally behind Aquino.