Timely initiative

By this time it is quite clear and undeniable that almost all of those we have elected into office, both national and local, past and present, from the President, members of Congress down to the Barangay officials, hold office mainly for purposes of promoting their own self-interest, not the public interest and the common good. To them, public office is not a public trust but a sure money-making private investment yielding huge profits. They do not properly and openly account for the public funds entrusted to them by the people, their bosses. Instead they even get mad when discovered to have done something wrong or illegal with those funds, borne out of a sense of self-righteousness and supposedly “good” intentions.

Thus we have now in our midst the present crop of politicians who have spent millions and/or billions of money to win elections; who are backed up by big business and jueteng or drug lords; who engage in non-stop politics by immediately campaigning after assuming office through posters and billboards displayed in public places also known as the “epals”; and the political dynasties which consider their public position as private properties that can be transferred to members of the families by succession.

With this kind of traditional politicians still in the saddle of power, it is really hard to carry out and achieve genuine reforms in our government. We have to change all of them and the candidates they will back up in the coming elections. We should not elect or re-elect any of them. As of now, this is the only way to achieve the much needed reforms in our government. It is futile to still hope that the present regime can accomplish such reforms as it had promised when it was still campaigning to gain power. It is really hard to still expect any change from this president who refuses to admit his mistakes and who believes that he can do no wrong at all. While it is true that this is the first time Senators have been charged and detained for plunder charges, the selectiveness and partisan color of the move is very apparent. 

Of course, the first step to take in order to ensure that the present crop of politicians will not be back in the saddle of power is to see to it that we will have “free, orderly, honest, peaceful, credible and informed elections.” This means that we have to improve our electoral system and the government body running the system and enforcing the election laws. This is the only way we could attract, honest, dedicated, capable candidates for public office who look up to public service as a public trust.

To be sure, when we had the 2010 elections we thought that our elections would already be clean and credible because it was the first time we conducted an automated elections pursuant to RA 9369. Indeed so many new faces and idealistic young men were lured to run for public office because they thought that the Automated Election System can eliminate the wholesale cheating happening in the past.

But as it turned out, the 2010 elections were fraught with so many irregularities mainly because of the defective machines used, the notorious Smartmatic PCOS machines, and the many violations of the RA 9369 on the safeguards to prevent possible manipulations of the machines. Foremost among these violations is the lack of the “source code” required by Section 12 which should have been made available to parties or interested groups for them to review how the machine works. This is the human readable instructions that define what the computer equipment will do. In the case of Center for People Empowerment (CenPEG) vs. Comelec, G.R. 189546, September 25, 2010, the Supreme Court observed that “errors in the source code can be disastrous because the code is executed by the computer exactly as written whether that was what the programmer entered or not.” So the SC ordered the Comelec to make said source code available to CenPEG and other interested groups. But the Comelec failed to do so because as admitted by its Chairman, there was no source code for the said machines in the 2010 elections!

Several IT groups also revealed other Comelec violations of the AES law particularly the scrapping of the security features like the digital signature requirements, the ultraviolet authentication of the ballots, and the voter verification requirement which were supported by “compelling evidence of electoral fraud in 2010” such as “the unauthorized wireless transmission of electronic returns to canvassing and consolidation servers… the pre-loading or the unauthorized scanning of ballots and recording of votes before the elections… the bloated number of registered voters (256 million instead of 51 million) during national canvass... the blatantly inaccurate voting results in the Comelec website…and the flawed random manual audit.”

Ironically the COMELEC even purchased the same defective machines for use in the last 2013 elections. And so the same electoral fraud once more surfaced particularly the discrepancies between the random manual audit count and the computerized tallies, the “60-30-10 pattern” and the malfunctioning PCOS machines.

While the 2016 elections may still be far off, it is better to start moving right now so that the same fraud and manipulations committed in 2010 and 2013 with the use of the same machines will not happen. The issues of whether to use the same machines for the automated election in 2016 must be properly addressed right now given the many violations and manipulations done in the 2010 and 2013 elections that placed in serious doubts the legitimacy of the present administration.

So it is not too early to take steps right now to ensure that the 2016 elections will not be like the 2010 and 2013 elections. Fortunately, the Kapatiran Party/Alliance for the Common Good has taken such steps. They have filed an initiative bill pursuant to the Initiative and Referendum Act (RA 6735) proposing the enactment by Congress of an Act amending RA 9369 plugging the loopholes therein particularly bestowing upon Comelec discretion on what it sees as best suited AES. The bill also ensures strict implementation and compliance of AES law by the Comelec most particularly on the minimum system requirements so that if these cannot be satisfied the Comelec should revert back to the old manual precinct operation while canvassing can continue to be automated.

Hopefully Congress will favorably act on their petition for a genuine and credible election.