The “Hocus PCOS” Re-visited on Day One of the 2019 Election Season
How easily we forget! Gardeners want to remind us that the oligarchic structure of our society is the root cause of all our social problems. We live in a world of a few rich daily getting richer while the majority hardly make it out of the poverty trap. The Philippine economy is growing fast – government does not tire of saying. But we are also experiencing one of the worst poverty situations ever, complete with new historic levels of hunger and unemployment. The Philippines gets richer – maybe – but Filipinos undoubtedly become poorer.
Many people who have the good habit of listening to Pope Francis have heard him say this many times: the worst thing you can think of, with the development of an economy, is this fact that only a few rich get richer, exceedingly so, and the majority poor find themselves worse off, destitute and hopeless. He called such a political economy the modern equivalent of mass murder – contrary to God’s law, “Thou shalt not kill!” (Evangelii Gaudium).
Humungous in character as this socio-economic problem is, the real solution must still be political in nature – the assertion of power by the majority populace, or the practice of truly democratic politics. Across the thousands of miles, out there in New York City, a 29-year old waitress beat the behind of a most powerful ten-term congressional leader. He outspent her by more than nine to one (actually 93 to 7) but her rootedness in social reality, and her spiritual tenacity and organizing skills enabled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) to expand the electorate, that is, to get the vote out from the hitherto non-voting members of the underclass – to beat her established opponent by a landslide – unabashedly exhibiting in the process her democratic socialist ideology in the simplest, most understandable of terms.
But can there be democratic politics in an electoral setting where people do not know – cannot know – what happens to their votes, whether freely given or freely bought? This is how the Philippines differs from New York.
We have seen that everything’s wrong with what used to be called the Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS) – yet the Philippine government sticks to it for billons of reasons. The name of PCOS has been changed and will be changed again but the fact is that for three straight elections now, voters in the Philippines could not know what happened to their votes. Voters did not see how their votes were counted.
The BEIs (Board of Election Inspectors) could not verify what they signed for. The result should therefore be seen merely as a de facto but not necessarily a de jure (or legitimate) government.
It should have been fine to automate only the canvassing and transmission at municipal/city, provincial and national levels. But at the precinct level we should count manually for full transparency!
The Source Code was supposed to be provided to political parties six months before the electoral exercise. This was never done and it seems there is not now any intention to.
The machines (the Optical Scanners) should be tested by the COMELEC in the presence of the BEI’s. This was never done and there is not now any intention to.
Each PCOS machine should have an electronic signature, naturally, so it can be identified as the one assigned to a particular precinct. Otherwise, an outside machine could overtake the legitimate one in the transmission of their desired results, which surely happened in the past three elections. The electronic signature requirement was never done and there is not now any intention to.
And of course the BEI’s should have their own password or signature for validation. This was never done and there is not now any intention to.
The law requires an accuracy rate of 99.995%, or only one tolerable error per 20,000 marks. The best showing by the PCOS, in the July 24-25, 2012, dry run in Congress, was 557 errors per 20,000 marks. No wonder then that the PCOS that had already been shown to be vulnerable to internal manipulation could now only yield fraudulent results.
Consider this: contrary to traditional voting preferences due to regionalism, religion, and economic class, one senatorial race showed a 60-30-10 trend for administration-opposition-independents— uniform in all provinces, districts, cities, towns, and precincts. Because of the absence of the aforementioned safeguards, the electronic process could easily be hijacked and programmed for such results by the powers-that-be, as in fact happened in 2010 , 2013 and 2016, and will inevitably happen in 2019 unless scrapped by revolutionary will forthwith.
Consider, too the following: had the Comelec completed the canvass in the 2013 election, which they conveniently stopped without justification, there would have been “more ballots cast than total number of voters.” To hide or prevent this, the Comelec had to stop and did stop the precinct count at 56% and the canvassing at 42%. No wonder it also had to lower the number of ballots cast from 38,998,998 to 31,568,679.
Who will now assume the urgent and necessary task of restoring our damaged political institutions to their original status and form? Who will prevent the total destruction of our political system – rebuild and nourish our political institutions back to health so that all those interested could join the political competition later, without the dice being loaded in anyone’s favor?
Is the question even being asked at all? It did not look that way today, February 12th – first day of the 2019 election season. FINIS