FALSE: Kabataan Partylist received about 160,000 votes in 2019 election

At a glance:

Claim: Only around 160,000 people voted for the Kabataan Partylist during the 2019 midterm elections.
Rating: FALSE
The facts: Kabataan Partylist received 195,837 votes during the 2019 midterm elections. This led to a seat in the House of Representatives.
Why we fact-checked this: The claim was made on October 24, 2020 in a Facebook post of Lorraine Marie T. Badoy, an undersecretary of the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) and a spokesperson of National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).

Complete details:

A Facebook post on October 24, 2020 from the verified account of Lorraine Marie T. Badoy contained this claim: “Nakatuntong ka [Kabataan Partylist representative Sarah Elago] sa Congreso dahil ginamit mo ang maskara ng prenteng KABATAAN Partylist. (Hindi nyo man lang naabot ang requisite 200,000 votes. Mga 160k lang. Sampid ka lang, sa madaling salita.)”

(You [Kabataan Partylist Representative Sarah Elago] got into Congress because you used the mask of the front KABATAAN Partylist. [You didn’t even reach the requisite 200,000 votes. About 160k only. You’re an outsider, in other words.])

The entire post is about Sarah Elago, Kabataan’s current representative in Congress, and how she is a member of the communist rebellion groups New People’s Army (NPA), Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).

Badoy is an undersecretary of Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO), as well as a spokesperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).

This claim is false. Kabataan did not receive only 160,000 votes during the 2019 elections.

The Commission on Elections’s Party List Canvass Report (By Rank) of the 2019 midterm elections shows that Kabataan Partylist received 195,837 votes, or about 0.70% of the 27,884,790 total votes for party lists. That was enough for them to get a single seat in Congress.

Also, the claim about the “requisite 200,000 votes” is misleading. The party-list bloc in the 18th Congress has 61 seats, or 20% of the total House membership, as stated in the Constitution. The parties, organizations, and coalitions that receive at least 2% or higher of the total votes cast for party-list representatives are entitled to at least one seat each. In order to fill all 61 seats, one seat each is allocated to the succeeding party-lists that receive less than 2% of the vote.

Aside from Kabataan, Kabalikat ng Mamamayan (Kabayan), which got 198,571 votes, and Democractic Independent Workers Association (DIWA), which got 196,385 votes, are party-list groups that won at least one seat during the 2019 elections and received less than 200,000 votes.

There is also no proof that Elago is a member of the CPP-NPA-NDF. Rappler has fact-checked a number of claims that red-tag the Kabataan representative:

Rappler has previously fact-checked Badoy’s claims that “red-tagging” is a term invented by the CPP-NPA-NDF. It has also reported on claims Badoy made about the ownership of a vehicle by Senator Manny Pacquiao’s campaign team member and a school project of Jillian Robredo, daughter of Vice President Leni Robredo, purportedly being a publication of the Liberal Party. – Percival Bueser/Rappler.com

This article was written by a volunteer of Rappler’s fact-checking mentorship program, a 5-week exclusive and hands-on training on detecting, investigating, and verifying online misinformation and disinformation.

Keep us aware of suspicious Facebook pages, groups, accounts, websites, articles, or photos in your network by contacting us at factcheck@rappler.com. Let us battle disinformation one Fact Check at a time.

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