Reforming two years before next elections

I have a new e-mail address: [email protected]

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He’s certain to be acclaimed by the Senate Electoral Tribunal. So this early Koko Pimentel is volunteering upon becoming senator to sit in one particular committee. That’s none other than the SET itself. And Pimentel says that by joining it he can help improve its procedures. He knows the problem well. It was in the SET where his protest against 2007 senatorial election 12th-placer Juan Miguel Zubiri had languished for four long years. Procedural loopholes delayed the decision to and actual recount of questioned canvassing in four provinces. Had Zubiri not resigned and withdrawn a counter-protest, SET deliberations could have dragged on till March 2013. By then, there would be only three months of tenure left in the Senate seat that Pimentel and Zubiri are contesting. Campaigning for the Senate would have commenced for the election of May 2013. Reforming the SET and its House of Reps counterpart would stabilize the electoral system, Pimentel said over Sapol radio show last Saturday.

In the same show Zubiri bade incoming senator Pimentel never to allow a return to the manual election system. In the manual system can be pulled off the “dagdag-bawas,” which messed up their votes in 2007. (Pimentel had questioned the tallies in Maguindanao and elsewhere; Zubiri, those in three provinces and Metro Manila.) Full automation of the 2010 polls eliminated tallying fraud and delays that make it possible. But cheating shifted elsewhere. Foremost at the local levels was buying of votes for as much as P3,000-P5,000 per head. Simultaneously at the Comelec headquarters, syndicates sold accreditations and victories for party lists, up to P30 million-P50 million. Then there’s the wangling of lopsided decisions from the Comelec en banc, allegedly also for payolas. Such dirty spending tempts the winners to filch from public contracts and congressional pork barrels. That’s why bad elections are said to be the root of bad government.

The Omnibus Election Code begs amending, as the Comelec says. Pimentel sees need to toughen the provisions not against vote buying by candidates but selling by voters. And chairman Sixto Brillantes needs to clean up the Comelec to restore the people’s faith in it.

Senate Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano doubts that Brillantes can do the job, for many reasons. For one, Brillantes isn’t convinced that the agency is sick. Perhaps he is standing too close to the trees to see the forest, having spent all his life as election lawyer dealing with it. Informed that nine suppliers have been cornering billion-peso contracts, Brillantes says they just happen to know the ins and outs of biddings better than others. Too, Brillantes seems to think that on the chief’s personality alone hinges the agency’s image. He had denounced then-chairman Benjamin Abalos in 2006, for purported horse-trading of poll cases. In open letter he detailed a dinner at a commissioner’s house during which Abalos allegedly offered to make Brillantes’s client in Batangas win if he would withdraw another client’s protest in Laguna against Abalos’s son-in-law. “You I never liked ... I simply find you most distrustful,” Brillantes recounted telling Abalos to his face. Today, Cayetano groans, Brillantes is so accommodating to Abalos and cheating ex-commissioner Virgilio Garcillano. Despite unresolved questions of massive cheating in the 2004 elections, Brillantes has released in full the multimillion-peso separation pay of the two, and their supposed confederates.

Still, now is the time to reform the electoral system and Comelec. It takes two years to pass laws or amendments, and draw up implementing rules. In 1996 national security adviser Jose Almonte urged Congress, in vain, to enact measures that would allow new faces to enter politics. Mostly trapos (traditional politicos) got elected in 1998. Again in 2002 he begged for reforms; nobody paid heed; the “Hello Garci” scandal marred the 2004 presidential results.

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Backing my recent piece against premature politicking, Camarines Sur Gov. L-Ray Villafuerte shares inputs from which other local officials can learn:

• In 2010 his province copped the highest palay production growth and tourist arrivals — areas that President Aquino lauded in the State of the Nation. The first was done via a range of initiatives, from reusing idle lands to improving irrigation-flood control. The second, 1.9 million tourists, via the CamSur Watersports Complex wakeboarding, and Caramoan Islands tours. This month the CWC will host for the third time the 28-country Cobra Ironman triathlon eliminations, preparatory to the world championships in Hawaii and Las Vegas. Caramoan has been the site of five international editions of the reality-TV hit Survivor.

• Still, local officials and businessmen are growing restive. For, a bill was rushed in the House, during the last nine days of the previous session, to gerrymander CamSur into two. The bill will separate Iriga City and 15 towns, notably Caramoan, into Nueva Camarines. Proponents say this is a reaction to bad governance that has prevented the city and towns to flourish. Yet statistics show otherwise. Like, the UNDP cites CamSur as 6th most improved province among 82. It has third highest life expectancy, 73 years.

• Opponents of the split are worried about the income loss that CamSur will suffer. The carved out province of Nueva Camarines will suck in P188 million a year in internal revenue allotments from the national government that should otherwise go to CamSur. Yet the new entity would need a billion pesos to start up, including erecting a new capitol.

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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ, (882-AM).