Elections Provincial Supervisor Jessie Suarez yesterday sent a petition submitted to him by Negros Occidental farmers, demanding the restoration of their Alliance for Rural Concerns to the list of accredited partylist groups, to the COMELEC head office in Manila.

He is also set to submit a list of nuisance candidates in Negros Occidental to the COMELEC regional office in Iloilo today for evaluation and submission to their head office for possible purging.

Suarez said he is recommending the purging of two provincial candidates whose names he withheld, and is also submitting lists of nuisance bets from the towns and cities of Negros Occidental.

About 80 protestors, mostly farmers, staged a rally in front of the provincial COMELEC office yesterday to air their grievances over the delisting of the ARC from accredited partylist groups qualified to participate in the 2013 polls.

Joel Alapar, ARC vice president for Visayas, said that while they are for the removal of millionaire and traditional politician-led pseudo party list groups, their group that represents the poor who work on the farms should not have been purged from the accredited list.

They are calling on the COMELEC to act carefully in its cleansing effort so that groups representing the poor and marginalized are not indiscriminately barred, he said.

Alapar charged that the COMELEC’s decision to exclude ARC was a pure act of insanity born out of senility, in apparent reference to the poll body’s chairman Sixto Brillantes.

Enrique Tayo, chairman of the Negros Occidental Farmers Federation, turned over their petition for the COMELEC to re-accredit ARC to Suarez, which he, in turn, sent to his head office in Manila.

ARC should remain an accredited party list group because it is an alliance of marginalized groups with rural concerns, Tayo said.*CPG

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