The 1995 election of members to the Senate of the Philippines was the 25th election to the Senate of the Philippines. It was held on Monday, May 8, 1995, to elect 12 of the 24 seats in the Senate. Filipinos protected the ballot boxes with their lives and campaigned against traditionalpoliticians who used bribery, flying voters, violence, election rigging, stealing of ballot boxes, etc. The Philippine National Police (PNP) listed five people dead and listed more than 200 hotspots before and 300 hotspots during the election.
Philippine Senate elections are via pluraity block voting, with the entire country as an at-large "district". Each voter has 12 votes, and can vote for up to 12 candidates. Seats up were for the 13th to 24th placed candidates in 1992. This is the first time that 12 seats will be up, and where the usual operation of the 1987 constitution is followed.
This was also the first midterm election for the 1987 constitution, and the first since 1971, as the date the elected candidates take office falls at the midway point of President Fidel V. Ramos' six-year term.
As the counting of votes was ongoing on May 11, former Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr. alleged that some senatorial candidates currently outside the unfinished tally's top twelve spots were beginning to rig votes by bribing people involved in the electoral process.[1] Pimentel also shared that two of his fellow Lakas-Laban senatorial candidates revealed to him that a vote-buying scam called "Oplan Dagdag-Bawas" (lit.'Add-Subtract') was occurring in Mindanao, where canvassers are bribed to shave off votes meant for Pimentel and transfer them to other candidates.[2] Pimentel later admitted that he lacks evidence for his claim, while a Comelec commissioner named Regalado Maambong dismissed the allegation as false.[3] After the election, Pimentel established the Foundation for Clean Elections, Inc. in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila to help prevent fraud in the country's elections.[4]
In May 1996, Maambong reversed his stance from the previous year and revealed that Comelec has found evidence of widespread cheating during the election.[6] Resureccion Borra, then executive director of Comelec, later stated that the 1995 election was the first time "dagdag-bawas" was committed on a massive scale, and announced that they will attempt to prosecute canvassers in the provinces of Ilocos Norte, Isabela, Bataan, and Lanao del Sur.[7][8] In July 1996, Senator Serge Osmeña revealed that he discovered a 30,000 vote discrepancy for him in Pasig City between the manual tally done by the Treasurer's Office and the certificates of canvass.[9] By December, a regional trial court in Bataan ordered for the arrest of Cenon Uy, an assistant regional director for Comelec in Central Luzon, for having allegedly tampered with election results in the region to favor the candidacy of Enrile,[10] though he would remain in office until late 2000 when a pending court case against him forced his resignation.[11]
On February 10, 2000, Antonio Llorente and Ligaya Salayon, who were respectively Pasig City prosecutor and member of the Pasig board of canvassers at the time of the election, was charged by the Supreme Court for violating election laws after they admitted their "honest mistake" of taking away votes from Pimentel and transferring them to Enrile.[12] Llorente eventually went on indefinite leave from his position as Justice Undersecretary in September due to the Supreme Court standing by its ruling.[13]
On September 11, 2000, Arsenia Garcia, who was chair of the Alaminos, Pangasinan municipal canvassers during the election, was convicted of electoral fraud by a Regional Trial Court in Alaminos due to her discarding more than 5,000 votes that were in favor of Pimentel, and sentenced to six years in prison.[14]
