Marcos Is Named Winner; Reagan Questions Victory : Aquino Backers Leave Assembly in Philippines

With the bang of a gavel, Ferdinand E. Marcos was proclaimed president of the Philippines for six more years by the National Assembly late Saturday, moments after every opposition legislator walked out in protest, branding the act “indecent, unconstitutional and illegal.”

The proclamation, which Marcos loyalists said he personally ordered take place Saturday night, came without debate at 25 minutes to midnight, less than eight hours after posting of the assembly’s final canvass of official returns from the Feb. 7 special election.

Palace Celebration

At 2 a.m. today the weary ruling party assemblymen were summoned to a celebration at the presidential palace, where Marcos delivered an acceptance speech dubbing his reelection “an historic victory.”

The government’s final, but contested, count of an election marred by fraud, violence and manipulation gave the 68-year-old Marcos 10,807,197 votes and his opponent, Corazon Aquino, 9,291,716. The president’s 1.5-million vote margin was his smallest in 20 years in office.

Marcos carried 53.5% of the vote nationwide to Aquino’s 46%, the remainder going to two minority party candidates. The turnout was a near-record low 77%, perhaps reflecting independent poll watchers’ charges that government election officials manipulated registration lists to deliberately disenfranchise more than 1 million Aquino supporters.

Aquino herself declared Saturday, “Nobody believes he is president, because the one vote he does not have is that of the people. No tinsel and celebration of the president’s make-believe win can hide his loss of moral and political authority. He is beaten.”

Aquino, 53, who claimed victory based on independent tallies within hours after the polls closed on election day, is scheduled to appear today at a large rally in downtown Manila to demonstrate her own mandate from the Filipino people.

Several Aquino aides have hinted that the widow of assassinated opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. will also issue a call for nonviolent civil disobedience to protest Marcos’ claim to power.

Rumors that Aquino also plans to proclaim herself “the people’s president” at the rally were apparently among Marcos’ motives in ordering his ruling party legislators to push his own official proclamation through first. A second motive, several assemblymen said, may have been to present a fait accompli for special envoy Philip C. Habib, sent to Manila by President Reagan in response to the Philippine political crisis. Habib arrived Saturday night.

First Such Walkout

The opposition walkout from the assembly--the first ever before a Philippine presidential proclamation--was meant to show unified support for Aquino by both moderate and leftist legislators in a 190-member body where Marcos enjoys a two-thirds majority.

“Our message is, ‘Marcos has proclaimed himself,’ ” declared opposition assemblyman Luis Villafuerte during a press conference immediately after the walkout.

At the press conference and in a statement by the 54 legislators, the opposition lawmakers said the walkout was designed to further isolate Marcos from the people and to protest a four-day canvassing process controlled by House Speaker Nicanor Yniguez, who was Marcos’ campaign chairman during the election. Villafuerte said the assembly ignored clear evidence of tampering and major procedural flaws in the canvass documents--provincial, district and municipal vote tally sheets representing the 20 million votes cast.

Calling the tally sheets “spurious and manufactured,” minority leader Jose Laurel Jr. labeled the proclamation, “a spurious proclamation of a spurious president.”

Asked for a Delay

The walkout came on a denied opposition request for a recess of several days to study a report by Speaker Yniguez rejecting formal opposition challenges to the ballot certificates.

“All we are asking for is a reasonable amount of time,” said opposition leader Homobono Adaza. “We now want to stop the proclamation because we think the report of the Speaker is erroneous.”

Marcos’ majority rejected the proposed deferral, and minority leader Laurel took the microphone. “The majority of this chamber would like to railroad the process and proclaim Mr. Marcos president,” he said. Turning to his fellow opposition members, he said: “I ask my colleagues to leave this chamber.”

The legislators walked out to cheers of “Cory, Cory, Cory,” from a small group of Aquino supporters, and opposition assemblyman Gemiliano Lopez grabbed the microphone and shouted: “The Filipino people will lose faith in this chamber and it’s because of your leadership, Mr. Speaker.”

After the opposition members had walked out of the chamber to the boos of Marcos’ supporters, the crowd broke into a wild cheer when Speaker Yniguez declared, “I hereby proclaim President Ferdinand E. Marcos as the duly elected president of the Philippines.”

His running mate, Arturo Tolentino, was similarly proclaimed vice president.

The president’s supporters in the visitors’ gallery broke into a Marcos chant.

Assemblyman Arturo Pacificador moved that the resolution be adopted unanimously. Speaker Yniguez promptly called for a vote. “If there are no objections,” he said, raising his gavel. “No objections,” he noted, banging the gavel and giving Marcos a new term.

It happened so quickly that many in the galleries were not aware that the proclamation had been adopted.

As Yniguez’s gavel came down, opposition leaders were in a nearby room giving reporters evidence in support of their challenges to the final tally and to the Speaker’s nine-page report justifying it.

‘Dirtiest, Most Dishonest’

Such evidence, they said, may have been yet another reason that Marcos’ legislators wished to push through the proclamation with minimal debate to avoid further public denunciation of an election that the opposition legislators called “the dirtiest, most dishonest and bloodiest . . . in the history of this country.”

Yniguez had maintained from the start that the assembly’s role is “merely mechanical” and that all protests should be heard by a Marcos-controlled nine-member tribunal after the proclamation of the winner. In his report dismissing opposition objections to the final canvass, Yniguez dealt with 11 categories of alleged impropriety in the tally sheets.

Referring to the 18 regional, city and district sheets lacking official government seals, Yniguez said, “This alleged defect is a mere procedural one.”

At their press conference, opposition lawmakers described the seals as “important safeguards to prevent tampering with the results” and called Yniguez’s comment “nonsense.”

The Speaker also said in his report that the figures appearing in six of the provincial and municipal tally forms were “allegedly statistically improbable,” but he added, “This is a mere conclusion which is extraneous . . . and beyond the competence of the assembly’s responsibility.”

More Votes Than Voters

Opposition assemblyman Omar Dianalan offered evidence at the press conference, which he said he would have disclosed to the assembly, to document dozens of examples of villages, towns and cities where election officials tallied more votes than the total number of officially registered voters, where complete election return forms had been manufactured the day before the election, and where many precincts recorded zero votes for Aquino, a kind of outcome that the Philippine Supreme Court once ruled was “statistically impossible.”

In one town, which has a population of 18,000, Dianalan showed election returns recording 25,995 votes for Marcos. He added that the provincial count in Marcos’ home province of Ilocos del Norte showed far more than the total of registered voters because the count included tens of thousands of votes from the provincial capital city, which also submitted the same election return forms separately.

The Speaker, in defense of the president, said in his report that the number of precincts reporting in Ilocos del Norte exceeded the number listed by the government’s Commission on Elections because the number of registered voters had increased and the local registrar was authorized to create new precincts to accommodate them.

Overall, the opposition contended that Aquino had been cheated out of 2.5 million votes.

Carried All 3 Sections

According to the assembly’s final canvass, Marcos carried all three sections of the country--Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. His 1.5-million margin of victory was delivered mainly from his native Ilocano region in northern Luzon, prompting opposition leader Ernesto Maceda to comment, “He is the president of Regions I and II”--the northernmost of the nation’s 12 administrative regions.

The canvass showed that Marcos won even in Aquino’s home province of Tarlac, her husband’s hometown of Concepcion and in her Manila stronghold of Makati.

Labor Minister Blas Ople, who served as a national campaign committee member for Marcos, said in an interview before the opposition walkout, “It is understood that the losing side would want to put as many impediments to this process as possible.”

Speaking to an American journalist, Ople said he believes that the tally forms were legitimate and authentic, adding “They may not meet your standards of purity, but be assured that all these votes were cast freely.”

Ople confirmed that Marcos had personally ordered that the proclamation of his presidency take place before today, but he denied that it was related either to Aquino’s planned rally today or to the arrival Saturday night of Reagan’s envoy, Habib.

Other Counts Differ

While the assembly canvass of returns was the only binding tally, two other counts continued to show conflicting figures. The National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), an independent poll-watching group, had Aquino ahead with 7,400,294 votes (52.4%) to Marcos’ 6,711,935 votes (47.6%), with 68% of the precincts reported. The government Commission on Elections had Marcos ahead by 7,782,825 votes (52.3%) to Aquino’s 7,079,744 votes (47.7%), with 71% of the precincts counted.