2016 election cheating being plotted this early

Notorious election operators VG and BP have been roused from decade-long retirement. Flown from Cagayan de Oro to Manila last week they had a tryst with the three main campaign strategists-financiers of a lagging presidential wannabe. To break the ice, talk first centered on the noble cause of preventing senatorial election cheating in 2016. When the hosts warmed up enough, the visitors were asked pointblank how to manipulate the presidential figures. VG initially protested that he was way past that notorious stage of his Comelec career. BP kept silent, enfeebled by a recent stroke. Both knew, however, that they couldn’t turn down the indecent proposal. Resistance could mean prosecution for their past, un-prescribed heinous electoral sabotages. If their hosts can keep party mates from supporting other “presidentiables” with threats of criminal linking to PDAF fixers, then what more them. They were hooked. It was like their now detained Comelec supervisor-pal LB being “convinced” in 2004 to zero the provincial kingpin’s election rival by forcible watching of a live execution by chainsaw.

Presumably the three political plotters will recruit more such aged poll manipulators. Five of them luxuriate in Baguio, Bicol, and Davao. It would pay to get to them before enemy parties do. Like VG and BP, they still have loyal ex-subordinates, once Comelec municipal foot soldiers since promoted to provincial or regional levels. Most of those ex-subs are hungry. Comelec multibillion-peso rackets have been centralized at the top, with loose change outsourced to selected computer technicians. Smartmatic’s precinct count optical scanners (PCOS) have made sure of that. No longer is large-scale “dagdag-bawas” (vote padding-shaving) done at provincial capitols and regional directorates – somehow spreading the goodies around – but at the head office. Even the congressional party-list results are falsified at the top. There’s a tricky part in tampering with national results, though: they have to be credible. For that, the final fudged figures have to hew closely to popularity survey ratings. With no paper audit trail to verify the PCOS count, believability is all that Smartmatic and its Comelec promoters have. And the final Hocus-PCOS must be massaged down to the regional predictions of the pollsters. Comelec-Smartmatic cannot risk another fiasco of impossible results, like in the 2013 senatorial race. Then, the PCOS apportioned 60-30-10-percent of the votes to administration-opposition-independent candidates in all precincts, districts, municipalities, cities, provinces, and regions. Bicol oddly did not vote solely for Bicolano candidates and junk others, as it always does; the Mindanao Muslim Region voted the same Christians and zero Muslims as the barangays dominated by the Iglesia ni Cristo and Born-Again sects. Popular televangelist Eddie Villanueva and ex-governor Tingting Cojuangco implausibly fared as low in their respective bailiwick home provinces of Bulacan and Tarlac as they did in, say, Banaue and Tawi-Tawi. That gave info-tech-critics strong ammo against the PCOS. That’s also where the old election-cheating network comes in. Through the retired operators’ “field experts,” the local results will be altered with finesse this time around. It’s going to be fiesta time for the hungry boys.

Politicos who were cheated in 2010 and 2013 already know what to watch out for. They’ve even learned to do the cheating themselves. The trick is not to manipulate but protect the votes in precincts where they are strong – and sabotage the results where they are weak. This can be done with the help of unscrupulous technicians. They are spread out nationwide, from the slew of 6,000 or so geeks hurriedly hired by Smartmatic a week before Election Day 2010 to reprogram 148,000 CF (compact-flash) cards of 74,000 mis-encoded PCOS units already fielded to assigned locales. Sly politicos had hired them thereafter to re-alter the CF cards in “enemy-held” precincts. That was why nine percent of precincts failed to transmit results to the national canvassing center then. More politicos learned to do the automated cheating in 2013, so hired more unscrupulous saboteur-techs. That time, 24 percent of the precincts failed to beam results to the Transparency Server. In both cases, Smartmatic blamed the three major telecom service providers for the transmission failures of its half-billion-peso modems, but the latter readily disproved it. Independent audits of the three telcos’ performance on Election Days 2010 and 2013 in fact showed 100-percent service coverage – including portable antennas and satellite connections in the remotest mountain, island, and valley barrios. It’s just that the PCOS didn’t transmit, because internally manipulated.

The local cheatings invariably affected the national tallies. The nine- and 24-percent transmission failures translated to tens of thousands up to millions of lost votes. Those mattered in close senatorial contests. In 2013 the Comelec had had to proclaim the winners despite the grossly incomplete results.

Election cheats tend to gravitate towards each other. Politicos find the right unscrupulous technicians, who in turn expand their local clientele through equally unscrupulous Comelec provincial and regional bosses. These form the network that the old operators can depend on, since now being tapped into the service of the lagging presidential aspirant. The aim of this trio of loyalists is to meld the local and national cheatings into one neat tapestry.

The only potent foil to them is the police-military. Spread out in camps are officers and gentlemen loyal not to the political masters but to the Republic. If the election manipulators are plotting their moves this early, various intelligence units and levels too are watching them and compiling reports – for release at the right time. Enlightened civilian groups will surely follow suit.

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