EDITORIAL - The right choices for the Comelec

After the poll automation fiasco and other disasters involving Philippine electoral exercises, the nation now has an idea of how important it is to appoint the right people to the Commission on Elections. The past years have seen the Comelec fall steadily in public esteem. When its commissioners aren’t being accused of stealing a kiss or accepting expensive gifts from a colleague, they are accused of corruption or sheer incompetence. This is unfair to the occasional upright, competent individual who gets named to the poll body, but this is how the Comelec has fallen.

Today two of the Comelec commissioners will retire: Ralph Lantion and the controversial Luzviminda Tancangco. Once their replacements are named, five of the seven-member poll body will be appointees of President Arroyo. This has nothing to do with machinations by Malacañang; it is just another one of those twists of fate in the life of the President.

The Comelec is an independent constitutional body, and under normal circumstances it could have maintained its image of independence from Malacañang. But because Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is in the unique position of being allowed to run for election to the same office – the first president to be allowed do so since the late Ferdinand Marcos – she is vulnerable to accusations of using the Comelec for her political purposes.

Which is why she must choose with extra care the replacements for Lantion and Tancangco. Already the Comelec, which is headed by a former member of the ruling Lakas-Christian Muslims Democrats party, is suspected of sitting on a motion for reconsideration involving a disqualification case against the President’s strongest rival in May, Fernando Poe Jr.

Even without that controversial case, the Comelec has a tough job ahead. It must revert quickly to full manual counting nationwide. It must make sure that the nation’s experiment with absentee voting, despite the tepid response of eligible voters, is implemented with a minimum of glitches. The Comelec has not even issued regular ID cards to new voters and those who bothered to participate in the validation last year. The last thing the Comelec needs is to have two new members who will be seen as corrupt, inept or, just as worse, doing the bidding of Malacañang. For her own sake and the nation’s, President Arroyo must make the right choices on this one.