Election aftermath - ROSES AND THORNS by Alejandro R. Roces

Elections are over. Soon we will be able to classify the candidates into two groups – the winners and the losers who will claim that they got cheated. The exceptions will be those who will acknowledge their defeat in a fair election and congratulate the winners.

In many places, the poor turn campaign cloth streamers into blankets, pillow cases and diapers. At least, the campaign material is salvaged and put to good use. But most of the campaign material will continue to deface our main thoroughfares. The Commission on Elections was supposed to assign common poster areas, but candidates posted their propaganda materials everywhere and now 2000 Metro Aides have been assigned to remove the posters. This will not be an easy task as the posters are glued to the walls and they will have to be scraped away with steel blades and glue cleansers. The task is supposed to take two weeks. Two months is a more realistic target date.

Some of the candidates who ran for office have pending cases in court. These cases will continue even if they are elected to office. Winning an elective position does not dismiss an administrative or a criminal charge.

But the real post-election problem is in the dissatisfaction in the way the election itself was conducted. In many places, duly registered voters were disenfranchised. Unquestionably, Comelec officials should be made to account for that anomaly. But there are anomalies that the Comelec can do very little about. Vote-buying, for instance. That is generally a private – not a public – deal between two parties. But the biggest mass cheating in any elections is in the counting of votes. The popular term for it is dagdag-bawas, add and subtract. That can only happen after voters have cast their votes and everything is in the hands of the Comelec.

Former Comelec Chairman Christian Monsod has asked Congress to impeach poll officials for allegedly mismanaging the election process. Monsod said that there is a law that required the Comelec to be automated by the year 2001. The Comelec had three years to implement this law. Instead, they spent P300 million of the taxpayers’ money on useless programs. He also said that the Comelec wasted time pushing for the P6.5 billion voter identification project that was totally unnecessary since a Comelec ID is not a prerequisite for voting. This project was dropped but only after Comelec spent P60 million buying Polaroid cameras that they cannot account for.

Calling for a Senate investigation of the Comelec, Sen. Blas Ople described it as the "most fractious commission in history and one of the most undisciplined agencies in the government." Among the things the Senate will look into are the alleged disenfranchisement of four million young voters; the poor information drive on the general conduct of elections; the deletion of names in the approved voter’s list; cases of double registration in Mindanao; the inclusion of political parties of questionable sectoral groups in the party-list election; the delayed canvassing in many parts of Metro Manila; the status of P280 million precinct mapping system and the failure to pay teachers who did poll duty on time.

How ironic that the first fruit of the elections is the investigation of the Comelec!