EDITORIAL - Fishing expedition

Losing candidates are within their right to question their defeat. The nation also deserves to know if there were glitches in the country’s first-ever automated elections that were significant enough to alter the results, especially in the national races. As of yesterday, however, the ongoing probe being conducted by the House of Representatives on possible automated poll fraud looked more like a fishing expedition being conducted in their home court by sore losers, or those who are sore that their relatives have lost.

There are proper venues and processes for settling electoral protests. Disputes over local races, including the one for Davao mayor that Speaker Prospero Nograles lost to his archrivals, the Dutertes, should be settled by the Commission on Elections. Such efforts to find company in misery can be indulged by a nation used to electoral sour grapes, if the efforts didn’t disrupt public expectations for a smooth transition. But after the record speed by which the Comelec announced the apparent winner in the presidential race, and then proclaimed all 12 winning senators, the nation will now have to wait longer than it used to when the elections were still manual for the official proclamation of the country’s new president and vice president.

Nograles, focused on proving that candidates like him lost through cheating, announced yesterday that the nation would have to wait for the proclamations up to June 30 – the day the president must be sworn into office. By that time, he and the other losers might have finally unearthed solid evidence, or at least found someone better than a masked storyteller, to bolster their allegations of fraud.

It’s puzzling that a purported whistle-blower has to hide behind a koala mask to talk about poll fraud. If the whistle-blower is telling the truth, the nation will be forever in his debt for revealing how automated poll results can be manipulated. He will be hailed as a hero and protected from the violent ire of candidates who might have been wrongly proclaimed as winners. The only reason for him to fear anything is if he is lying, or worse, if he has been paid to lie, for which he should be unmasked and sent to prison for electoral sabotage.

By all means, everything that went wrong in the automated elections must be pinpointed. It is also not farfetched to believe that certain winners were wrongly proclaimed, either due to deliberate cheating, mechanical glitches or human error. But the nation should not be held hostage to a fishing expedition by losing candidates.