As Comelec plays dumb, here’s how cheating will be done

Continuing the countdown, it’s now three years and two months since the P10.07-billion plunder of MRT-3 began. No shame, no remorse, no letup by Transport Secretary and Liberal Party president Joseph Abaya. No admonition from appointer P-Noy or any anti-graft agency. So goes on the misery of hundreds of thousands of daily rail commuters.

Last Tuesday night at the height of typhoon, passengers w ere told to get off, as the trains no longer would proceed. One station of the 17-km line was flooded (due for sure to unmaintained water pumps). No refund of fares, or offer to convey the stranded riders to their destination stations, by rented bus or even Army truck. They were left to find their way through the downpour, cold wind, and sickening floodwaters.

Had it been a bus, jitney, or taxi that no longer could complete the trip, it would have been different. Under the land transport franchise law the driver or operator is mandated to help the passengers look for alternative rides, and their fares refunded based on distance traversed, if not in full. Same with airlines and ships.

Not with the government-operated and -maintained MRT-3, and its sisters LRT-1 and -2. All this decline is under P-Noy’s most insensitive and inept “bata-bata” Abaya, and the latter’s screaming subs: U-Sec. Julianito Bucayan, MRT-3 GM Roman Buenafe, and LRT head Honorito Chaneco, among others.

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The seven-member Comelec is both secret agent of the Liberal Party and sales agent of Smartmatic vote cheating machines.

Its DQ of Grace Poe from the presidential race elates the LP. It ruled on conflicting constitutional matters. That is, on her supposed unnatural-born status as a foundling that bars her from national office, versus the Bill of Rights equal-protection clause that allows all, including foundlings, to be President, VP, senator, congressman, or Supreme Court justice.

The poll body further DQ’ed Poe based alone on one self-admitted erroneous entry in her candidacy paper for senator in 2013. Ignored were her 400 pages of proofs of more than the required ten years residency by Election Day 2016. The Comelec further will thrill the LP by DQ-ing next Rodrigo Duterte. Sleek lawyers will find the justifying technicalities. With the two survey frontrunners out of the way, the only serious LP rival left is Jojo Binay. No problem for the LP. Malacañang has been using not only its pliant Dept. of Justice but even the “independent” Anti-Money Laundering Council, Ombudsman, and Commission on Audit to get Binay jailed on any charge. Civil unrest is sure to erupt. “Just let the people decide,” ex-President Fidel Ramos advises.

For good measure, there’s the PCOS (precinct count optical scanners), from Venezuelan wheeler-dealer Smartmatic. Insiders can manipulate the machines to fabricate results. Any automated cheating can only benefit the ruling party.

PCOS has become synonymous with fraud, “Hocus-PCOS.” So the Comelec re-baptized it as VCM (vote counting machines), then OMR (optical mark reader). Netizens quickly spread other meanings, “vote cheating machines” and “O-MaR,” in reference to the LP standard bearer.

Comelec persisted. Decommissioned were 82,000 PCOS units, used only twice, 2010 and 2013, and for which it had spent P16 billion to lease-purchase, accessorize, and warehouse. Then, it leased and bought 97,000 new ones for an initial P14 billion, kickbacks yet untold. It’s the same opaque, unreliable machine. Diverting attention from the scam, the Comelec babbled non-essentials like “no bio-no boto” and voting in malls.

It’s jabbering more nonsense. Allegedly three of four PCOS safety features that Smartmatic removed in 2010 and 2013 will be restored this 2016. Bah! In removing those safeguards, Smartmatic broke the Election Automation and the Procurement Reform Acts. It should be blacklisted from any more government contracting. But then, the sales agents need dirty commissions.

The first of three restored features is source-code review. Ongoing is the farcical exercise, so restrictive there is no real review. The PCOS units have been purchased, hence already the property of the government. Yet the alien seller drafted the rules of review under supposed proprietary licenses. (Cannot car or cell phone buyers dismantle and examine their purchased units anyway they wish?) Real info-technologists are boycotting the source-code show, lest their names be used for Smartmatic fraud.

Two other features are the ultraviolet detector of fake ballots and electronic passcodes of precinct election inspectors. That sinister Smartmatic is restoring those now could only mean it has developed ways to override them for cheating. Comelec has yet to explain why, in recent court-supervised manual recount, 78 of 80 boxes contained ballots neatly wrapped in manila paper. The ballots likely were fabricated in anticipation of the court action, but the PCOS manipulators forgot to unwrap them.

The Comelec rejects the fourth – vote verification receipts – due to vote-buying it supposedly would breed. (Comelec jealously wants to be the only one bought.) The law requires that the machine issue to voters auditable paper VVRs – proof that it read and counted the ballots right. Overruling Congress, Comelec says voters might not drop the VVRs in designated slot in the ballot box, but show it to the vote-buyer as “proof of purchase.”

Does the Comelec know this? There’s a surer way for vote-buyers to make sellers correctly shade the balloons of not just some but all 40-plus names of their choice. That’s by issuing newsprint grids the size of the ballot, with holes corresponding to the desired balloons. All the seller needs to do at the precinct is fit the grid atop the ballot edge to edge, and shade all the holes. Blots on the sides of the holes would be proof of the diligent shading. Such grids are as legal as the codigo or even sample ballot that voters used to bring to fill up blanks in the old system.

This modus works in tandem with others. To avoid attention, political ward leaders would haul voter-sellers not by large jitneys but small tricycles, in groups of five to ten. Known supporters of rivals would be paid to stay home and not vote on Election Day.

To ensure compliance, voter-sellers and “stay-cationers” at first will be paid only half of neatly cut P500- or P1000-bills. The other halves would be handed over, along with transparent adhesives, for taping together, after the misdeed is done.

There would be hundreds of thousands, probably millions of mutilated peso notes after Election 2016. Politicos are unperturbed. The Bangko Sentral is on a yearlong demonetizing of the present bills till end-2016. Taped bills will be accepted for exchange with new issues, based on rules, so long as three-fifths of the note is intact along with the signatures of the President and the BSP governor.

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