Staring on the face of failure of elections?

The more that Comelec spokesman James Jimenez and Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal try to discredit the whistle-blowers (there are three now, with only one hiding his face), especially the so-called “Koala Boy,” the more that the people would suspect that Comelec officials are all part of a massive conspiracy to defraud the Filipino voters big time! How could Commissioner Larrazabal say that the allegations of “Koala Boy” are preventing them from doing their job? Isn’t it the job of the Comelec to give the Filipino voter clean, honest and credible elections? Well, they have failed in this endeavor!

Perhaps Comelec officials are still in a denial mode basking in the accolades we gave them earlier and refusing to accept that the reports of fraud are mounting and coming from all over the country. If you ask me the Comelec should give weight to the statement given by the 86 foreign international observers who came to the Philippines to check how we conduct of our elections, who declared that the May 10 elections “were neither fair or honest.” While I submit that I was one of those who congratulated the Comelec for the quickest count last May 10, but then this quick count suddenly crawled to snail pace. This alone should be enough for people to ask… what happened… where did it go so terribly wrong?

Rather than totally dismissing the accusations thrown against the Comelec and Smartmatic, they should instead keep an open mind and come up with a committee to thoroughly investigate whether or not these whistle-blowers are telling the truth or not because there are just too many questions that we have asked the Comelec and written about them, but not a single soul from the Comelec cared to respond to our articles.

Again, let me ask James Jimenez or Gregorio Larrazabal to explain to us what happened in Cebu province, where the total (60 percent) number of voters was 1,500,628. Then add all the votes cast for all who ran for president, the total is 1,411,850. Then subtract this from the 1,500,628 and you will get a total of 88,778 voters who did not vote for any president! In the vice presidential race, the figure is higher with 151,954 who did not vote for a VP! Filipino voters waited for so long to vote for a president and when the time came, a huge number of voters did not vote for their president? I find this very odd, strange and very disturbing. Even more intriguing is the deafening silence of the Comelec to explain this phenomenon to us.

Then there’s the congressional hearing on the automated elections that had House Committee on Electoral Reform and Suffrage chairman Rep. Teddy Boy Locsin blowing his top against Smartmatic official Heider Garcia, shouting at him, saying, “You sons of bitches! You had us standing here guaranteeing to the public and the world that even if fraud is committed, we would be able to trace it. We never said that fraud could never be committed, but you said we could trace it. But now, you tell me that at 10 in the evening, you could do it and we would never know?”

Meanwhile, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) said there were a lot of discrepancies, yet they found no fraud as they stopped their counting of the election returns. No fraud? Methinks that the PPCRV spoke too soon! If Smartmatic cannot even explain the errors before the congressional committee and that fraud can no longer be traced and the Comelec refuses to answer even simple questions that we have presented to them, then there is something seriously and terribly wrong with the last elections. Are we staring at failure of flections on its face?

Talking about Smartmatic, I saw a 2006 report about the Smartmatic-Sequoia voting systems that were questioned by the Financial Commission of the City of Chicago, where Alderman Beaver said the Chicago primary elections were the worst of the past 32 years, insisting that the voting equipment presented serious faults and failed to produce precise results on time. Meanwhile, Alderman Ed Burke said, “We’ve stumbled across what could be the international conspiracy to subvert the electoral process in the United States of America.” We only got this report very recently. Had we known about this incident, we would have warned the Comelec not to get Smartmatic; they’re just too hot or too dirty to handle!

Here’s an even more interesting news about Smartmatic… albeit two years late… that Alfred Jose Anzola Jaumotte, the co-founding partner of the Smartmatic voting system in the US, was killed in a plane crash near the Caracas airport in Venezuela. This small plane was piloted by Mario Jose Donadi, a convicted drug trafficker in both the US and Venezuela, and he was with another Smartmatic employee. Reports say that the plane belonged to the CIA. Two people were also killed on the ground when the plane crashed into a house. Hmmm, this is uncannily similar to the helicopter crash of Quezon Gov. Rafael Nantes that also killed people on the ground. I just hope that the CIA isn’t involved in the turmoil we are now experiencing in our tarnished polls.

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