Comelec brass ignores gang of insider-forgers

There’s a syndicate at the Commission on Election that forges ballots, precinct returns and other poll documents. Top-rate election lawyer Romy Macalintal stumbled upon this in the course of defending a politician-client, and promptly reported to the commissioners. Oddly the commissioners ignored him and kept quiet. This, after they unduly favored the contender that benefited from the spurious papers?

The protest against Camarines Norte Gov. Jesus Typoco should only be incidental to the forgery gang’s existence. But it becomes key in light of dubious events. Loser Edgardo Tallado had disputed Typoco’s 2007 victory for “manifest errors” in the statement of votes by precinct (SOVP) in Labo town. The filing was done 110 long days after Typoco’s proclamation. Yet the Comelec first division entertained the case in spite of the law limiting “corrections” to only five days from proclamation. The division members claimed to have power to interpret the rule as they please. That’s debatable. At any rate, in Apr. 2008 they declared Tallado the new winner by 65 votes.

Typoco hired Macalintal to move for reconsideration by the en banc. Macalintal’s first act was to check with the Election Records and Statistics Department the Labo SOVP that was the basis for the pro-Tallado ruling. To his surprise, the department staff and head told him the document look fake because of wide variances with usual SOVPs. Macalintal promptly included this in his motion.

Still, on Feb. 24, 2009, majority of the en banc upheld the division verdict favoring Tallado. Macalintal says Commissioners Nicodemo Ferrer (ponente), Leonardo Leonida, Lucenito Tagle and Armando Velasco seemed to have drafted the ruling long before his discovery of the forgery. Only Commissioner Rene Sarmiento dissented and called for re-canvassing of Labo election returns. On afterthought the others issued a separate memo for the NBI to investigate the insider fraud. Digging deeper, Macalintal noted from the records section’s logbook that the majority commissioners had not bothered to borrow the SOVP on file. They just took Tallado’s word for it about “manifest errors.” Had they checked, the records keeper would have discovered the fraud earlier. Did they know something was wrong?

Macalintal raised hell. He asked the Supreme Court to stop Typoco’s unseating and Tallado’s proclamation. Too, he begged the commissioners to flush out the forgers. Ignored, he challenged Chairman Jose Melo to a legal duel: if he is able to prove the forgery, the pro-Tallado commissioners should resign; if he fails, he would give up lawyering forever.

Last May 22 the NBI confirmed that the SOVP was indeed spurious. Still no word from the Comelec.

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The Comelec is to award today to Smartmatic of Barbados the P7.4-billion supply of 82,200 precinct count optical scanners. Smartmatic’s skill is in making touch-screen voting machines, not optical mark reading PCOS. In fact, Smartmatic states these in its product brochure: OMR or PCOS may cause “civil unrest”, 2-10 percent error rate for OMR or PCOS, and it is more confident with its touch screen solution. Melo says bidding losers are only “sour-graping.”

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Last Friday from Palawan I reported the filing of graft raps against four local leaders for illegally leveling a mountain in San Vicente town. One of them, Vice Mayor Joseph Armstrong Palanca of Coron, reacts:

“Before anything else, I encourage you to continue your advocacy for good government and conservation, and I hope Palawan will continue to be among your concerns.

“Now to your column: you can take this with a grain of salt if you wish, but the allegations against me and the other local leaders are the first salvo by my cousin Gov. Joel T. Reyes of what is proving to be dirty May 2010 elections. The Kilusan Sagip Kalikasan (KSK), which initiated the case against me, is neither an NGO nor an environmental movement. It is in fact directly under the Office of Governor Reyes; its personnel are his political appointees working at his pleasure.

“There is no truth at all to the charges against me. Any lawyer worth his salt can peruse the documents filed with the prosecutor and confirm this. When (not if) the charges are dismissed, I will let you know. And as the topic is about quarrying, you might verify the quarrying in Coron to reclaim a patch of pristine sea at a whooping (sic) price of P400 million. Check if it is properly documented and who gained a couple of hundred million pesos from it. And before I forget, it may interest you to know that my cousin Governor Reyes is presently out on bail after the Ombudsman found probable cause to indict him before the Sandiganbayan on, what else, but a quarry/mining-related criminal offense.

“In fairness to San Vicente, it has the highest percentage of forest cover in the whole of Palawan. To quote well-respected Edong Magpayo, executive director of Palawan Conservation Corps, in his front-page report in The Palawan Times (June 8-14, 2009): ‘Namangha ang grupo (Global Legal Action on Climate Change) sa nakita sa San Vicente dahil sa hindi inakala ng mga miyembro nito na ang bayan pa ang may makapal na kagubatan samantalang madalas sinasabi na ito ay wala ng puno bunga ng operasyon dito noon ng isang logging company.’ If not for the able stewardship of its mayor, Antonio V. Gonzales, and his predecessor Antonio C. Alvarez, San Vicente would not have the potential to be a major environmental tourism destination in Asia. Coron, on the other hand, is already a popular tourist destination but risks losing that privilege with the way its natural resources are being destroyed.”

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