EDITORIAL - Electoral sabotage

On Jan. 23, 2007, Republic Act 9369 was signed into law. It amended previous laws on poll modernization and paved the way for the holding of the midterm elections in May 2007. RA 9369 also created a new offense called electoral sabotage, in an effort to stop poll fraud. The new offense carries only one penalty: life imprisonment.

If former officials of the Commission on Elections are telling the truth, the administration that passed RA 9369 ignored the new law, including the provision on the new offense. Lilian Radam and Yogie Martirizar, former provincial poll supervisors for South Cotabato and North Cotabato, respectively, have submitted affidavits to a joint probe panel of the Department of Justice and the Comelec, alleging that they were ordered to rig the vote in 2007 in favor of the Arroyo administration’s senatorial candidates.

Radam and Martirizar have implicated former Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos in the alleged cheating. Abalos has vehemently denied the accusations. The two former supervisors have also identified their “handlers” in the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines as well as officials of the Arroyo administration who helped them in their legal defense when they were implicated in the electoral protest filed by Aquilino Pimentel III, who initially failed to make it to the winning circle in the Senate race.

After Lintang Bedol emerged from hiding and talked about rigging the vote for administration bets in Maguindanao where he was the election supervisor in 2007, Miguel Zubiri, who was declared the 12th winner in the Senate race, quit and withdrew his counter-protest, paving the way for Pimentel to finally serve as senator. Now two other former election supervisors are giving similar stories of rigging the 2007 vote.

Victims of poll fraud cannot recover their stolen term of office. But they can still get justice if those responsible for rigging the vote are made to pay for the crime. A tough law has been passed to discourage vote rigging, which has marred every electoral exercise in this country. But the law cannot be an effective deterrent unless it is enforced and violators are punished. With witnesses coming out and apparently in possession of material evidence to prove poll fraud, the 2007 elections should serve as a good test case for penalizing electoral sabotage.