Untruthful elections in the local level

Let’s not be carried away by too much back patting and accolades to the COMELEC. It may have really accomplished something in the successful holding of the first automated election in this country. But such feat should not completely obliterate the many election related offenses it miserably failed to prevent particularly in the local elections.

The COMELEC and the public in general should not look at these election malpractices as mere sour-grapes from poor losers and just sweep them under the rugs. Otherwise these cheating and other fraudulent practices and flagrant violations of our election laws and rules would be institutionalized and accepted as “normal” and correct in every election hereafter. If that happens, our democracy will become an automated farce.

A move that the COMELEC should seriously consider is the action of the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE) which is one of its accredited citizen’s arms. Recently LENTE announced that it will file with the COMELEC anonymous complaints against persons who committed election offenses in the just concluded elections. It argues that anonymous complaints should be allowed “to protect complainants from harassments and retribution from affected parties”. LENTE believes that this is the better step to instill accountability in every political exercise and deter the commission of election offenses.

Among the major election offenses that LENTE has monitored in the recently concluded political exercise are: rampant vote buying and selling; threats; intimidations; use of fraudulent devices or other forms of coercion; appointments of ineligible members of the board of election inspectors; contents of the certificate of canvass; use of public funds, money deposited in trust, equipment, facilities owned and controlled by the government for any election campaign; transfer of officers and employees in the civil service; coercion of election officials and employees; intervention of public officers and employees in the conduct of the election; and the violation of the firearms ban during the election.

LENTE is the COMELEC duly accredited organization that conducts voters’ education, monitors election related offenses, and provides legal assistance to non-partisan groups monitoring the elections and initiating complaints against people who had committed election related offenses. Hence the result of its works and its move in the last election especially in regards to the major election offenses it has monitored are credible enough to merit serious consideration and probe by the COMELEC.

The COMELEC should not simply bask in the glory of its apparent success in conducting the first automated election in the country. Not because the electronic machines work and produce results in record time does it mean that the last election is already credible. The election may be generally peaceful and orderly but it does not mean that it is also honest. The results coming out of the machines are obviously tarnished by all sorts of offenses that LENTE has monitored especially in the local elections.

To be sure the COMELEC should also look into the performance of the machines used. It should also consider the many observations of the IT experts about the vulnerability of those machines to possible manipulations by some unscrupulous candidates in the local elections. The danger here lies in our tendency to overlook and disregard these possibilities just because the overall results on the national level particularly the president, vice president and senators seem to be the popular and acceptable outcome as they even coincide with the pre-election opinion surveys of credible pollsters. It will be most unfortunate if the many frauds and manipulations committed in the local level will be concealed and swept under the rugs just because the results in the national level look acceptable and credible.

Random manual audits (RMA) were allegedly conducted already. The problem here is that these RMAs were done without the presence of all the parties concerned. Some of them were notified but the notice came one day late. This alone already raises a lot of suspicion that something amiss has happened and that there is an insidious attempt to hide anomalies committed on the machines to favor some local candidates.

So it is now becoming apparent at least in the local elections that the data inputted to the machines were votes obtained through commission of various election related offenses and/or that the machines were also tampered with to manipulate the outcome of the elections.

To erase all these doubts and suspicions the COMELEC can order a parallel manual count of the results in the local level. But the problem here again is that the ballots may not have been preserved and are no longer the same ballots fed into the machines. Hence the prevailing feeling right now is that automated or not, truthful elections in the Philippines remain as elusive as ever. It is still an impossible dream.   

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