The land of magic-magic

All that media nonsense about Ping Lacson rushing over to Raul Roco because FPJ won’t have him, or that Da King has rejected Da Kamay na Bakal out of hand because he doesn’t need him, or that Lacson is eager to team up with Poe, etc. makes lurid headlines to mebbe sell a few newspapers – but they’re obviously both hype and hokum.

At this stage, everybody needs all the help he can get. I didn’t mention "she’, because President GMA has all the help she needs – uncluding government funds and, the nastier-inclined aver, most importantly of all, the Comelec.

Indeed, the Commission on Elections has, alas, managed a loss of credibility faster than the fall of the once-omnipotent Chairman of Walt Disney Corp. last weekend. Michael Eisner was ejected from decades of iron-clad "rule" by 43 percent of the shareholders at a stormy annual meeting. Imagine being fired by Mickey House from your throne atop the Magic Kingdom!

What about the Comelec? Is it going to become the "Kingdom of Magic-Magic" in the May 10 elections? That’s, unfortunately, the widespread question. Comelec Chairman Ben Abalos, increasingly sounding like the TRAPO he once was (not is?), is making matters much worse by stubbornly insisting that the very suspicious Korean-manufactured automated counting machines, for which the Comelec hastily paid more than P850 million before the software was even delivered out of the weird P1.3 billion Mega Pacific deal, should be used, nonetheless, in selected urban areas.

Whaaat? Didn’t the Supreme Court, with finality, shoot that questionable deal down, and order those machines rejected? The High Tribunal even advised that those concerned be investigated, and – di ba? – prosecuted?

Are Abalos and his Commissioners now trying to sneak around the Supreme Court (defying it) by dragging in an old joint concurrent resolution by Congress to bull through the use of those very some machines in places like Quezon City, Mandaluyong City, in Luzon; Iloilo City in the Visayas; and Cotabato City, along with several chartered cities in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Sanamagan – the "votes" automatically collected there could decide the Presidential and national elections! Could? They certain would.

What’s this baloney about "borrowing" those ACMs – some 1,945 now in the Comelec’s possession? The Comelec need not borrow them. It owns them, is stuck with them, and cannot conceivably get our taxpayers’ money, so speedily disbursed, back – ever. The outrageous solution proposed is even more disgusting and disruptive than the massive "loss" of government funds: The utilization of those machines which the public already believes are equipped with either "Trojan chips" (to favor a certain candidate, guess who?), or can easily be accessed by hackers and electronic fixers, will outrage an already discombobulated public.

The Comelec must stop these bizarre maneuvers. Otherwise, let’s face it, a victory won by President GMA will not be accepted by our people, and remain for all time under suspicion, even in the minds of her most fervid supporters.

The Chief Executive must know that such maneuvers serve her ill. We surely don’t want to think that, in a frantic bid to get re-elected (and not suffer the trauma of her beloved father), she would cast aside honor and decency. She has the edge, not merely the equity of the incumbent. Let her not bungle it.

Back to manual voting? For this election, at least, we must.

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In the United States, "touch screen" technology with automated counting has blown up into a big issue, and is being passionately contested.

Reporting on the use of mandated by the "new voting technology" machines "Hava" (The Help America Vote Act), which is the US federal government’s effort to overhaul the "antiquated" ways of voting, ‘The Financial Times’ last Wednesday (March 3 issue) headlined: "Voting Machines Become Yet Another US Election Issue."

Wrote FT correspondent Henry Hamman: ". . . the biggest concern is whether the new machines accurately record and report votes."

Said the article: "Hava was supposed to usher in a new era of technologically sophisticated voting and update an election system that became a global laughing stock after the 2000 electoral meltdown in Florida, but the modernization effort has fallen victim to attacks by an unlikely coalition of computer security experts, liberal Democrats and conspiracy theories.

"Two issues dominate: how to verify the vote counts reported by touch screen voting machines and how much trust to place in the software code controlling the recording and counting of the votes. As the new technology has been rolled out, incidents of vote miscounts, mechanical breakdowns and unauthorized adjustments in the software have popped up from New Mexico to Indiana."

Such machines, it has been pointed out, don’t have a printed "ballot" to back up its count – so how can electoral protests be decided? The Diebold Election Systems – one of the big manufacturers of touch screen machines (it also manufactures most ATMs, like the ones we use here) – has come under the heaviest fire by most experts, spearheaded by the VerifiedVoting.org., founded by the respected David Gill, a Stanford University computing professor, as well as Avi Rubin, of John Hopkins University. "These concerns," the Financial Times just noted, "gained an endorsement when the IEEE Computer Society, a leading organization of computer professionals, devoted the January issue of its journal Security Privacy to Professor Rubin and Professor Dill."

Imagine using such kinds of machines in Mindanao? Or, susmariosep, in the very places in Metro Manila where once before, dagdag-bawas, in earlier polls, had already been exposed? It’s easier, in the public mind, to fake electronically than to fake the ballot. I kid thee not.

Our Comelec must cease and desist. If even in high-tech America, such machines are already embroiled in controversy, what about those "made in South Korea", sadly no longer just the Land of the Morning Calm, its traditional name, but, sorrowfully, beginning to come under an unwanted new label, the Land of the Evening Scam.

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It’s unjust and unfair. That’s what I firmly believe. The President – while she may have every right to withdraw an appointment, presumably before it is consummated – did Sandiganbayan Presiding Justice Minita Chico Nazario a grievous wrong. Last February 10, the Chief Executive had publicly announced Justice Nazario’s appointment as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, obviously to fill the vacancy in the 15-member Court created by the retirement of Associate Justice Josue Bellosillo.

After that, Justice Nazario’s appointment dropped into limbo. There was no oath-taking, the signed appointment papers seem to have disappeared. And now comes a calculated Malacañang leak to "confirm" that Justice Nazario is not going to the High Tribunal after all.

What happened to the official declaration last February 11, by Presidential Spokesman Ignacio "Toting" Bunye, that Nazario’s appointment had been based on her outstanding performance and the recommendation of the Judicial Bar Council (JBC) headed by no less than the Chief Justice himself, the Hon. Hilario Davide Jr.? Gone in a puff of smoke?

The vagueness of her fall from grace, the disappearance of her "appointment", has shamefully exposed an innocent jurist with a sterling record of 40 years in the judiciary to humiliation.

It also exposes the President and her merry men to suspicion. The rumors have been flying thick and fast in the past week that Nazario was never sent to the High Court because she had "refused" to play ball – i.e., vote against FPJ – or that she had told the very powerful Palace lawyer who gave her a loyalty test that she would vote on the Poe case "according to her conscience". True or not, those "tales" are circulating.

In any event, the significance of her possible vote is now moot, since she never got to the court and the Tribunal has already voted 8 to 5 in favor of FPJ. Yet the terrible fact remains: She was humiliated.

If it’s any consolation to Sandiganbayan Presiding Justice Nazario, the rumors are strongly in her favor.

It’s true that when Nazario’s appointment was announced last month (not that of solicitor General Benipayo’s) it aroused a storm of controversy. After all, she had been presiding for two years over the plunder and graft cases filed against former President Joseph Estrada. Was she being dispatched to the SC, the speculation went, to hammer in the final nail in the coffin of FPJ’s political aspirations? Obviously, this is not what happened.

Another piece of unfair "hot gossip" was that her husband, Mr. Rodolfo Nazario, was the "manager" of boxing champion Manny Pacquiao, and that GMA was courting the support of the nation’s sports idol, Manny. How the malicious will put a spin on everything.

In the end, nothing of the sort occurred.

Perhaps it was the honor of her "peer group" that did Justice Nazario in. She belongs to the distinguished University of the Philippines law class of 1962 – the which Justices Reynato Puno, Alice Martinez, and Consuelo Ynares Santiago belong. Those three, finally (though one of them had been a GMA appointee), voted in favor of FPJ.

The way I see it, although only God can look into the hearts of man and maid, is that the honorable Justice had declined to compromise.

Abangan who will be appointed now.