Will You Stop Fraudulent Elections Now? Ten Crucial Points to consider
The Gardener’s Tales (Third of a Series) By Charlie Avila
Manila, March 10,2022 – In the Second Part of this series we read: “Lest the ‘Many’ wake up to political realities, the ‘One’ (dictatorship) and the ‘Few’ (Oligopoly) must make sure the election game is rigged.”
Firstly, it should now be clear 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 may be 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.
Okay, so the Philippines gets richer – maybe – but Filipinos undoubtedly become poorer.
Said Pope Francis: this is the worst thing you can think of, that with the development of an economy, 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 of exclusion, like what we now have, the modern equivalent of mass murder – contrary to God’s law, “Thou shalt not kill!” (Evangelii Gaudium). Nothing short of a new social order, a new system like that designed by Social Democracy can bring authentic change, and not just more of the same.
Secondly, however, humungous in character as this socio-economic problem may be, the real solution is still political in nature – the assertion of power by the majority populace, or the practice of truly democratic politics.
But can there be democratic politics in an electoral system where people do not know – cannot know – what happens to their votes, whether freely given or freely bought?
We have heard ad nauseam and seen that just about everything’s wrong with what used to be called “the Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS)” – yet the government sticks to it, under various names, for billons of reasons. For many elections now, voters could not know just what happened to their votes. Voters did not see how their votes were counted.
Not even the BEIs (Board of Election Inspectors) could verify what they signed for.
Thirdly, then, it should have been fine, as Gil Ramos, Gus Lagman, Chris Monsod, Nelson Celis, Glenn Chong and other experts have constantly insisted on – to automate only the canvassing and transmission at municipal/city, provincial and national levels. But at the precinct level we should have counted, or, from here on, we should be counting manually for full transparency and possibility of review! Beyond the precinct level, in any case, canvassing and transmission would still be quick with automation. Such a COMELEC decision would then be in accord with the spirit of the election reform law.
Fourthly, let us consider again the following:
A. In the election automation law, the Source Code was supposed to be provided to political parties six months before the electoral exercise. This was hardly done and, even now, there is very little effort to do it right. Lately, they wanted to console us by saying they had deposited it with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, in accordance with law.
B. The machines (the Optical Scanners) should be tested by the COMELEC in the presence of the BEI’s. This was hardly done and there is very little effort to do it right.
C. 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 often happened in past elections.
D. And of course, the BEI’s should have their own password or signature for validation. This was hardly done and there is very little effort to do it right.
Fifthly, then, can you believe that there will be true elections in 2022? I am not saying that there is no more time to do anything about it, especially if enough people wake up to this truth and immediately act in a collective way. The automated election law requires an accuracy rate of 99.995%, or only one tolerable error per 20,000 marks. The best showing by the PCOS, in their own dry runs, was 557 errors per 20,000 marks. How can we not expect that this kind of automation is, indeed, vulnerable to internal manipulation and yielding fraudulent results?
Sixthly, 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— results shown to be uniform in all provinces, districts, cities, towns, AND precincts. How was that possible? Because of COMELEC’s choosing to forego one or all of the legally required safeguards, the electronic process could easily be hijacked and programmed for such results by the powers-that-be, as in fact happened in past elections and will inevitably happen from here on unless scrapped by revolutionary will forthwith.
Seventh, we should remember, too, the following: had the Comelec completed the canvass in the 2016 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.
Eighth, talk of election failure has surfaced again, and quite intensely, too, in the wake of COMELEC ‘s inability or unwillingness to follow the law on safety nets, which we have just discussed, and, more importantly, to cleanse their registry, which experts have seen as padded with 12.8 to 14.7 million ghost voters, shown by their analysis of the pattern where the rate of increase of registered voters is so much larger than the rate of increase in the Philippine population – which you can see immediately in the following chart.
Ninthly, are we not all familiar with these facts – how FVR pulled a fast one over Miriam Santiago when elections were still conducted manually, only to get worse since 2010, after automated elections; how the manual dagdag-bawas victimized Sen. Nene Pimentel in 1995 and how it has now evolved into an exquisite art form within the opaque processes of our automated elections; how Ateneo Math Professor Felix Muga exposed the impossible 60-30-10 Senate vote pattern in all precincts following the early implementation of automated elections; how Atty. Glenn Chong detailed the COMELEC-SMARTMATIC magical tactics whereby cheating syndicates toyed with us the voters, treating us to interruptions in the vote counts during these automated elections to subvert the electoral sovereignty of the Filipino people.
Tenth, what are we to do? What is to be done? Whom does the COMELEC serve? The One, the Few, or the Many? Did not our Constitution design it to serve all – in fairness and honesty at all times?
But isn’t appointing power Duterte in full, 100% control of COMELEC, that the Chairman and all the members will do whatever he wants? And yet, did not the Oligarchy make him feel that their money, too, had power when two of their guys beat bis chosen Bong go to Number One in the senate results?
In this second ongoing bout between Marcos and Robredo, the latter clearly being the Oligarchy’s favorite, who will the street-smart Duterte favor to further his interests? The former, the latter, or neither, and why? In Philippine politics, we know, the first thing to remember is that things are not always what they seem.
In a multiple sided contest, will money and the naked use of power mean everything, or will it not rather lead at first to quasi-anarchy, obliging the Guardians of the Constitution to intervene, as on two occasions before, and give a warm welcome to the “Many” for a chance to wage People Power 3 and eventually open the road to a true social democracy, or at least a necessary transition thereto?
The incessant prayerful stance of the Filipino people may again cause a majority preference for creative non-violence, and the Constitution-sensitive Armed Forces may this time help institute the likes of a Council of State inclusive of our moral leaders who will assume the urgent and necessary task of restoring our damaged political institutions to their original status and form.
The role of such Council will not be to succeed the incumbent president, but solely to prevent the total destruction of our political system – to 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.
Like a crew whose task is to put everything in order before a commercial carrier…is cleared again for take-off, the council’s duty will be only to repair the battered tripartite system [legislative-executive-judicial] and to make sure that the people are once again able to freely and intelligently elect their own leaders. (More to come… )