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The Lost
He is an experienced connoisseur who was hailed as a reformer of the electoral system and died of coronavirus in a country besagered by him.
By John Leland
This obituary is part of a series about other people who died in the coronavirus pandemic. Learn more about others here.
Sixto Brillantes, Jr. , an election lawyer in the Philippines, enjoyed following American politics, and when the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush ended up in a court war in Florida, where the votes were counted, the Family Bright circle had some concepts of how the final results may have been different.
If Mr. Gore had hired Mr. Brillantes as a lawyer, his relatives told him, they were sure he would have won the case.
Brilliant has thrived in such battles, becomes chairman of the country’s Electoral Commission, a position his father aspired to and had never reached.
Brillantes died of coronavirus in a Manila hospital on August 11, 3 days before her 81st birthday, her daughter Sandy Brillantes Lennon said from her home in Connecticut.
In a statement, the electoral commission praised Brillantes as a reformer who “zealously attacked those seeking to undermine public confidence in the electoral system” and “cleaned house” in this contested body.
The virus devastated the Philippines, which raised its quarantine before the maximum of East Asian countries and has been described as an outlier in the region for its rising rates of infection and death, its death one of more than 2500 in the country this week.
Sixto Serrano Brillantes was born on August 14, 1939 in the fortified intramural neighborhood of Manila, the fourth of five young people from Sixtus and Azucena Serrano Brillantes. His father is governor and deputy who has become electoral commissioner; her pharmaceutical mom.
In addition to his daughter Sandy, he is survived by two daughters, Lyn and Zeena Brillantes; 3 grandchildren; and 3 brothers.
Mr. Brillantes was 16 and entered the University of San Beda to study accounting and business, when his father became an election commissioner, then said his father had an ambition: to be president. It was Mr. Bright Major who persuaded his son to study law in San Beda. Sixto would be his main elegance in 1965.
Five years later, she married Francisca Verde, a nutritionist and professor at the University of the Philippines in Manila, who died in a car accident in 1992.
Although Brillantes was drawn to the intrigue of politics, he did not first contemplate a career in electoral law. “He didn’t think it would be lucrative,” Lennon said, because of all the downtime between the election. . ” Then he learned that the instances lasted for years.
After a season in corporate law, working with business tycoons who hosted political ambitions, he set up his own company with friends.
In 2004, he represented the presidential candidacy of action film star Fernando Poe Jr. , whose opponent, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, challenged his citizenship. Poe and Brillantes won the war for citizenship, lost the election, blamed the fraud, and asked the Supreme Court to overturn the election, and Poe died before the court ignored his complaint.
The case “catapulted him to glory,” said Brillantes Lennon, along with others who stopped him in the street.
He nearly retired or resigned as ambassador in 2011 when he was presented with the chair of the electoral commission under President Benigno Aquino III, a former client. Eight teams have requested to block his appointment, writing in a that his beyond delight with the commission “familiarizes him too much with the game, intrigues and personalities of the institution: he would possibly have accumulated favors to repay, debts to settle and accounts to collect. “
But Mr. Bright won. He placed a chair in his workplace that had belonged to his father, and explained that he intended to take on the task instead of his father.
After retiring in 2015, he traveled with his children and had planned a Disney cruise to Eastern Europe before he hit the pandemic, Lennon said.
And he saw the presidential election in the United States relentlessly.
“He wasn’t a Netflix guy,” he said.
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