Repol therefore merely serves as a reminder that, in a petition for certiorari from an interlocutory order, the petitioner bears the burden of showing that the remedy of appeal taken after a judgment or final order (as opposed to an interlocutory one) has been rendered will not afford adequate and expeditious relief,18 as it is often the better practice for a party aggrieved by an interlocutory order to continue with the case in due course and, in the event of an adverse decision, appeal from it and include the interlocutory order as one of the errors to be corrected by the reviewing body. In this instance, petitioner filed a motion for reconsideration of the Second Division’s order. When that failed, no other speedy and adequate remedy against the unpardonable vices attending the Second Division’s treatment of the election protest was left to him except recourse to this Court under Rule 65. Under the circumstances, he was without the shadow of a doubt justified in taking it. Election Protest and Ballots As Evidence It will be recalled that the Second Division had been apprised of the ballot boxes’ impaired condition even prior to the commencement of the revision proceedings. This notwithstanding, it brushed aside petitioner’s protestations that he was the victim of an ingenious post-election fraud involving infiltration of the ballot boxes and the clever switching of ballots actually cast with invalid ones to ensure his defeat in the election protest. The division ruled that: mere allegations cannot suffice to convince this Commission that switching of ballots has occurred, absent any positive and direct evidence in the form of fake ballots themselves being found among genuine ballots. Regardless of any technical examination that may have been conducted or testimonial evidence presented, as emphatically moved by the protestee but denied by the Commission, the best proof of the alleged substitution of ballots is the ballots themselves. And the process by which this proof is established is by way of an evaluation of the ballots by the Commission itself during its appreciation of the revised ballots.19 On the basis of this reasoning, the Second Division proceeded with an appreciation and recount of the ballots from over 300 precincts and set aside the physical count of the revised ballots in favor of the election returns only in precincts the ballot boxes of which were found to contain spurious ballots. In view of the facts of this case, the Court cannot but hold that the Second Division adopted a manifestly unreasonable procedure, one totally unfit to address the single most vital threshold question in an election protest, namely, whether the ballots found in the ballot boxes during the revision proceedings were the same ballots that were cast and counted in the elections. The purpose of an election protest is to ascertain whether the candidate proclaimed elected by the board of canvassers is the true and lawful choice of the electorate. 20 Such a proceeding is usually instituted on the theory that the election returns, which are deemed prima facie to be true reports of how the electorate voted on election day21 and which serve as the basis for proclaiming the winning candidate, do not accurately reflect the true will of the voters due to alleged irregularities that attended the counting of ballots. In a protest prosecuted on such a theory, the protestant ordinarily prays that the official count as reflected in the election returns be set aside in favor of a revision and recount of the ballots, the results of which should be made to prevail over those reflected in the returns pursuant to the doctrine that "in an election contest where what is involved is the number of votes of each candidate, the best and most conclusive evidence are the ballots themselves." 22 It should never be forgotten, though, that the superior status of the ballots as evidence of how the electorate voted presupposes that these were the very same ballots actually cast and counted in the elections. Thus, it has been held that before the ballots found in a box can be used to set