Just three days before up to 50 million Filipinos go to the polls, the son of national democracy heroine Corazon Aquino said he was buoyed by the latest survey results but urged his supporters to be vigilant against skullduggery.
"We are very grateful to our countrymen. They saw the validity of our message and they saw that we were sincere," Aquino said after the survey showed 42 percent of Filipinos intended to vote for him to be their next president.
"(But) those who are thinking of cheating may be more active... so we should be more determined that the will of the people will be triumphant on Monday."
Aquino, 50, is a balding bachelor who spent the past decade as a low-key congressman and senator.
But he has defied his rivals' attempts to portray him as an uncharismatic political lightweight by tapping into popular sentiment for his revered mother, who died of cancer last year.
Corazon Aquino led the "people power" revolution that overthrew dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, then served as the nation's president for six years.
She earned a reputation for being above much of the corruption that plagues the Philippines, and her son has similarly campaigned on a platform of clean governance.
His main rival in the election appears to be former president Joseph Estrada, 73, who was deposed in 2001 amid graft allegations for which he was later convicted.
Estrada climbed past business titan Manny Villar with 20-percent support, according to the survey released on Friday by polling body Social Weather Stations.
Villar, who had long been seen as Aquino's main rival, slumped to 19 percent from 26 percent recorded in the previous survey carried out in mid-April. Aquino's numbers were up from 38 percent.
The survey was the last major opinion poll to be released ahead of Monday's election to choose a new president, members of parliament and thousands of other government posts for the Southeast Asian nation of 90 million people.
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Estrada secured the most emphatic win in Philippine electoral history in 1998 when he received 39 percent of the vote.
Aquino, who was set to make his final campaign rally on Friday night to tens of thousands of people in Manila, said efforts to steal the election from him were his greatest concern, and not any legitimate challenge from his rivals.
"If the people are allowed to vote and their votes are counted properly, I think I will win," he said.
Philippine elections have long been tainted by cheating and violence.
Critics of President Gloria Arroyo, who is required by constitutional term limits to step down on June 30, accused her of using illegal means to win the last election in 2004, charges that she denies.
Concerns about the credibility of this year's election were fuelled by a technical blunder from the election commission this week which forced it to recall faulty memory cards for the nearly 80,000 vote counting machines.
The commission has insisted it can replace the cards in time for the election, but Aquino and the other presidential candidates have all said they fear the nation's first attempt at using computers to count votes could fail.
Estrada filed a motion with the Supreme Court on Friday to delay the election so there would be more time to ensure all the technical glitches were ironed out, but the application was immediately rejected.
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