May 19, 2007, 4:15 GMT
Manila - A tie between two candidates for the last spot on a town council in the northern Philippines was decided with the toss of a coin, a news report said Saturday.
Candidates Brian Bellang and Benjamin Ngeteg were tied for the eighth and last spot on the council of Bontoc town in Mountain province, 270 kilometres north of Manila, the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper said.
To break the tie, election supervisor Mary Umawing suggested a coin toss.
'The people were not expecting that tossing a coin was an option to break the tie,' she told the Inquirer. 'The people were laughing and asking me, 'Are you joking?''
While it may sound odd, Umawing said the Commission on Elections actually allows flipping a coin or drawing lots to break a tie.
Bellang, 37, a neophyte politician, chose heads and won, the report said.
'At first, it was hard to explain the feeling when I won, but I was happy that I won,' he said, adding that Ngeteg, a relative, had agreed to the tie-breaking flip.
Filipinos voted for half of the 24-member Senate, all of the more than 200 members of the House of Representatives and some 17,000 local officials on Monday.
Many of the winners in the local and congressional elections have already been proclaimed, but it could take three more weeks before the official results of the senatorial races are known.
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