Worsening crime needs focus of 5 top officials

Flash: Australian parliament rules out electronic voting.

This news bit adds another developed country to the growing list of European and U.S. states that are reverting to manual balloting. It also puts the spotlight on crooked Comelec officials.

“Crooked,” because they’re rushing to give shady Smartmatic Inc. P7 billion more this week for unreliable voting machines.

The automation law doesn’t require it. The country can’t afford it. Info-technologists, mathematicians, statisticians distrust it. The machines worked below par in 2010 and 2013. Smartmatic broke basic safeguards and developer-software rules. The overseeing agency for biddings had nixed it. Even the Comelec legal division is against it. Most telling, the crooks are to retire on Feb. 2.

Crookedness then is the only reason for them to want to pay the Venezuelan P7 billion to supply 43,000 more machines and refurbish 86,000 old ones for which Filipinos already wasted P15 billion.

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Excerpts from the report of ABC News political correspondent Lyndal Curtis (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-20/parliamentary-committee-rules-out-move-to-electronic-voting/5905926):

“Using pen and paper to cast ballots will stay, with an (Australian) parliamentary committee ruling out a shift to electronic voting.

“The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has released an interim report that there are too many risks associated with the move.

“It said shifting to electronic voting was not feasible in the near future without ‘catastrophically compromising electoral integrity.’

“The committee found machine electronic voting was vulnerable to hacking. Measures to mitigate that risk would be costly and still require voters to visit a polling booth.

“Committee chairman Tony Smith said: ‘In future it is likely, given the turbo-advances in technology, that a system of online electronic voting could be delivered with acceptable safety and security. But even when we reach that time, there should be considerations beyond the convenience it would offer.’

“Mr. Smith said ‘technological convenience must be balanced against electoral integrity.’

“The committee report said the majority of countries continued to rely on paper-based voting and some that have invested in electronic voting had since abandoned it. The United States was also moving away from electronic voting, with about 70 percent of voters in the recent midterm elections casting a paper ballot.

“The committee recommended some options for using more technology in the voting process, such as electronically interconnected rolls to allow names to be simultaneously crossed off at all polling booths, and electronic scanning of ballot papers to allow electronic count.

“It found those measures would reduce the chance of people voting multiple times and would speed up the counting of votes.”

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The first step to solving a problem is to admit that it exists.

Crime is worsening. In the past week three heinous crimes against females were reported:

• In Bataan was found the body of a 14-year-old – kidnapped, raped, killed, burned, stuffed in a sack, and tossed down a ravine. She was last seen at school dismissal. While searching for her, the parents received anonymous texts for P500,000-ransom, which they negotiated down to P50,000.

• In Metro Manila a lass witnessed two hooded men dragging a schoolgirl into a van. Noticing, the men grabbed her too. Inside the men punched them in the head, while mumbling about selling them to strangers. When the men alighted at a deserted area, the girls escaped.

• Also in Manila a cabbie pulled out a gun to rob his passenger. When she resisted, he shot her four times in the face.

Crime has various triggers: drugs, loose firearms, greed, or easy getaway. Stopping criminals entails certainty of capture and punishment, and wiping out narcotics and unlicensed guns. Last week was the fifth anniversary of the Ampatuan massacre of 58 political kinswomen, female lawyers, and accompanying newsmen. The Maguindanao masterminds and henchmen, including crooked cops, did it because they could. The Aquino admin vows no more repeat. Yet it promoted two Army generals who had abetted the 198 massacrers, and lets political warlords keep private armies – the very guarantees of repeat. It merely pays lip service to justice, and ignores the problem of criminality.

The next step to problem solving is to devise solutions. This needs effective planning and execution. To his credit, the Philippine National Police chief acknowledges the crime wave. His corrected volume for 2013 was 631,406 incidents, double that of 2010 and triple the fudged 217,812 of 2012. Yet he fails to stem it, as PNP morale is dragged down by reports of his hidden wealth and favoritism in officer placements.

To her credit too, Justice Sec. Leila de Lima admits that the Bureau of Corrections under her is sleazier than ever. Despite the sacking of three directors, prisons allow convicted narco-traffickers to operate – from air-conditioned cells. Meanwhile, politicking stains investigations by the supposedly elite NBI, also under de Lima.

Crime is systemic. It teems due to police ineptness, bad prosecuting, slow trials, loose penalizing, and public distrust to report. The Philippines is now the most violent of the ASEAN’s ten states, surpassing once-war-torn Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and despot-ruled Burma and Indonesia. It is the world’s ninth worst in terroristic killings, kidnappings, and bombings.

The crisis calls for highest, widest attention. The five top officials – President, VP, Senate President, House Speaker, and Chief Justice – and their subs need to act in concert. There are mechanisms for it: the executive-legislative-judicial coordinating and national security councils. There are resources too, by the millions of personnel and billions of pesos.

Personal differences need casting aside for the national good. Petty is No. 1’s dislike of the compulsory attendance of his predecessor or of No. 5 who ruled against his funds. Flimsy too are political sniping between No. 2 and partisans of Nos. 1 and 3. 

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