The mother of all electronic voting scams?

You have to be politically naïve, dense or foolish if you believed that there was no cheating in the last May 10 elections. All I did was to ask our own househelp who went home to their hometown and when they came home, they told us that they were able to get P500 for their votes. This has been the practice in many provinces, municipalities and cities since democracy started and the last election was no exception… vote buying continued in the areas where they have for all intents and purposes become a tradition.

The mechanics is simple enough. Voters in their respective barangays go to designated areas (most favored are the residences of their barangay captains or leaders) to get sample ballots with a P200 folded with it. Then they go to the polling center to vote and when that is done, they go back to the designated area to show that they have voted (by showing their forefinger dirtied by the indelible ink) and they receive another P300 pesos to complete the illicit transaction. It’s that simple and this has been done for decades!

This is why in the areas where dominant political families have stayed in power for decades there is such a thing as a command vote. Meaning, their constituents would vote straight from the President down to the last municipal councilor whosoever the political gods have blessed. In short, what I’m trying to tell you is that despite this illicit transaction between the political lords and their constituents, there is some honor in it as the voter who sells his or her votes does what is being asked of them. Yes, Virginia, the poor and the unwashed still has some dignity left and would honor their contract!

It is for this very reason why I refuse to believe that Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay who is unheard of in Cebu ended up in second place in the vice-presidential race with a total of 413,975 votes in Cebu City and Cebu Province when his partner President Erap who is more famous than him garnered only 88,674. That’s a whooping 325,307 difference!!! Mar Roxas got more than a million votes in the whole of Cebu and I would like to believe that Sen. Loren Legarda should have been a close second to him, not Binay!

But back in the 1969 Presidential elections, Pres. Marcos made sure that Sen. Serging Osmeña would lose in his own precinct! It was unbelievable then and somehow, this has been repeated with Gov. Gwen F. Garcia losing in her own precinct against Jun Davide, a Cebu City Councilor who is a relatively unknown in the province. Would you believe that Erap lost in San Juan and Bayani Fernando lost in Marikina? These incidents tell me that there is a rat tweaking these PCOS machines for a large scale electronic Garci scam!   

I dare the Comelec to do a manual count of the province of Cebu and I’ll bet you that Binay’s votes would dwindle to single digit levels. Already, the parallel count that the Comelec did in Cantabaco, Toledo City showed that the automated count resulted in higher votes than in the manual count. In Bo. Mulao, Liloan, there were some 200 plus voters there and when the PCOS machine transmitted its results…the report was zero votes!

Anyway what we wrote about vote-buying is something that no computer or PCOS machine could stop. Then out of the blue, there are two whistleblowers, namely, Melchor Magdamo who was in the staff of Comelec Chairman Jose Melo and Dr. Arwin Serrano, a member of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) who was assigned to the Comelec. They first came up with that report about the attempt to purchase the blue folders at P380 each that the Comelec en banc decided to cancel, which should give them a very high credibility rate.

Now these two have sought the help of former Solicitor General Frank Chavez and held a presscon in Makati together with Mr. Ernesto del Rosario, from the Comelec’s Information Technology Department who had details on the anomalies in the automated systems. This centers on the accuracy of the vote count after the compact flash cards in the PCOS machines malfunctioned. Did it really malfunction as reported or are we seeing face-to-face the mother of all electronic scams being perpetrated in this country?

Then there’s that other whistle-blower whose statements were taped by Manila Times columnist Buddy Cunanan. This whistle-blower was masked to hide his identity and he apparently surfaced because of a crisis of conscience and is willing to show a documentary evidence in the proper forum and believe me, his statements are very damaging and a mute testimony that the Filipino people were taken for a ride in the last May 10 elections. I gathered that this taped interview can now be downloaded in YouTube.

This whistle-blower really puts some logical answers to the illogical results that have been happening in Cebu and throughout the rest of the country.

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