Whatever happened to the Marcos cheating machine?

The continuing hullabaloo about automated cheating in 2010 and 2013 cannot just be wished away. I don’t think President Noynoy Aquino is in any danger of being stripped of his mandate nor can the winners of last May’s election be dislodged so easily. Public outrage about the Comelec’s shady practices and its cantankerous chairman may be building up, but no people’s power explosion appears to be in the cards anytime soon.

Still, the sustained Tanggulang Bayan (TanDem) barrage against the alleged “60-30-10” pre-programmed results favoring Team Pinoy in the last elections is too serious and too compelling to just set aside. The uncanny statistical discrepancies and telltale patterns of manipulation are too shocking to pass off as mere figments of the imagination or the handiwork of poor losers.

 Backed up by IT experts from the United States and local activists from UP and the Ateneo de Manila, the multi-sectoral group’s voluminous evidence begs to be taken into account and evaluated on its merits. All but accusing President Aquino himself of being behind the massive electoral farce, the group must be given their day if only to remove any doubt on the administration’s mandate to govern.

No less than a vast conspiracy of Marcosian proportions is being alleged, with supposedly rigged poll surveys and exit polls conditioning the public to accept the predetermined results rapidly and stunningly delivered on election night itself.

Unlike in past elections, the past two exercises, 2010 and 2013, have moved on to the electronic age. Previously, the manual count dragged on for weeks and months, allowing whoever was in power to “massage” the results in their favor. In this age of Smartmatic, a Venezuelan poll technology firm with American connections, the count is over and the winners are proclaimed before any question could be raised.

In the old days, any protest faced bureaucratic delays that took years and almost always ended up superseded by the next elections. Under Smartmatic, losers practically have no choice but to give up in exasperation. How do you argue with a machine and heedless officials who alone speak for that machine?

And there’s the tyranny of the eternal election cycle. Every three years, there’s an election and the line immediately forms for the next battle, not to agonize over the previous one that has receded into history.

Unfortunately, we have a culture of denial and ridicule that favors the powerful and condones organized cheating.

“In Philippine elections,” so goes the familiar line, “there are only winners and those who were cheated.”

Crying foul about electoral fraud has become a joke. Why so? Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan. This is a country of balimbings or people with reversible political jackets.

Everybody loves a winner, no matter how questionable the victory. Losers are shunned even by once-loyal supporters.

Remember that in the April 1946 presidential election, the first under the republic, Manuel Roxas won a very narrow victory against the old and dispirited Sergio Osmeña, Sr., who did not bother to go through the agony and humiliation of a doomed protest. General Douglas McArthur, the liberator of the Philippines, and the ruling Castilaloy elite were solidly behind Roxas and that was that.

Elpidio Quirino, who took over after Roxas’ unexpected death in two years, had to cheat so brazenly in 1949 that the saying “all the birds and the bees voted in Lanao” became part of Philippine political literature.

Except for 1953 when Ramon Magsaysay turned against his patron Quirino and captured the popular imagination, all elections have been invariably called dirty and rigged, some more heinously so than others.

If incumbent presidents like Quirino, Garcia and Macapagal had all lost their reelection bids, it was said that they were too complacent and did not cheat enough to guarantee victory by hook or by crook. Ferdinand Marcos, after pulling off a surprise victory over Macapagal in 1965, made sure he wouldn’t be the next victim of this dreaded reelection jinx.

In 1969, Marcos simply went on a massive patronage and buying spree against an unpopular opponent, Serging Osmeña, that could still have backfired if not for the dirty tricks to “syquionize” it. This was the euphemism for his intelligence operatives who engineered wholesale vote- rigging, ballot box switching and psy-war operations worthy of Quirino’s black legacy.

With the government bankrupt, a substantial part of the elite outraged, and a nascent student radical movement, this audacious but winning strategy would lead to the grand explosion that was the First Quarter Storm of 1970. The FQS would, in turn, open the door to martial law and the long dictatorship ahead that destroyed whatever democracy remained in the long-battered republic.

Under martial law, Marcos turned electoral fraud into a perfect art of Hitlerian dimensions. In 1978, 1984 and the 1986 snap election, the impregnable cheating machine crafted by Leonardo Perez, Marcos’ evil genius, was deployed with terrifying force.

Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men and Marcos could also go awry and it did in 1986. EDSA unexpectedly brought a confluence of events — withdrawal of US support, a military rebellion, and People Power — that threw Marcos out of power.

Did that catastrophe spell the end of the dictatorship’s black tradition of organized fraud or the total dismantling of the colossal Marcos cheating machine?

Not on your life. The Cory Aquino regime did take over the Comelec, but the cheating infrastructure was hardly touched and, by most accounts, it survived largely intact. Perez’s men and allied operatives in the equally notorious Department of Local Government made themselves useful to the new powers-that-be and they displayed their fealty in the 1987 senatorial elections. Cory almost got the “total sweep” she sought, except for the unwanted interlopers Joseph Estrada and Juan Ponce Enrile (installed by no less than the Supreme Court), who could not be so easily “extrapolated” from the winning candidates.

Fidel Ramos, Cory’s anointed successor, won in 1992 by the slimmest of margins and largely thanks to the Sulo Group or the potent remnants of the Marcos cheating machine based in a Quezon City hotel. Miriam Santiago’s protest withered on the vine and she remains bitter about being robbed of the presidency to this very day.

Santiago has long named these dark forces headed by a Ramos general and a DILG honcho still active in the trade up to the present administration. They remain deeply embedded in the Comelec and DILG. GMA’s favorite “Garci” and his Maguindanao team only form the tip of this unsinkable iceberg of organized cheating.

Why Cory Aquino never obliterated this biggest blot on Philippine democracy will be forever debated. Perhaps it was a matter of convenience when it was important to show the world that she was in full command and everybody would look the other way as she brushed aside the rights of demonized critics and enemies.

The momentum of reform soon passed and she could no longer muster the political will to sweep aside the more corroding features of the Marcosian order. Her successors, including her own son, could not exactly be blamed for taking the line of least resistance. The system ain’t broke for their partisan purposes, so why fix it?

Erap Estrada, the champion of the masa, was so popular in 1998 and Joe de Venecia such a sure loser that Ramos’ powerful Sulo group defected to Estrada, some say with the president’s covert blessings. Ramos would come to regret this decision and in two years helped engineer EDSA Dos to overthrow Estrada.

This Sulo group, its ring leader a classmate and close friend of Mike Arroyo, just as easily defected to Gloria Arroyo when Erap fell in 2001. They delivered the vote in the same year for Arroyo’s candidates (a foretaste of Team PNoy in 2013), as well as in 2004 when GMA brazenly stole the election from Fernando Poe Jr.

In 2007, the same year Zubiri appeared to survive the rout of Gloria’s personal senatorial candidates (Pichay, Chavit, Defensor) the cheating machine veterans apparently saw the handwriting on the wall. Gloria was definitely damaged goods. In 2010, they were reported to have sold Gilbert Teodoro down the river for the apparent winner, Noynoy Aquino, at the last minute. They have since become untouchable under the present regime, all but spared from charges of massive graft and human rights abuses lodged by the yellow forces when GMA was in power.

Is it any wonder that the dark election operatives from the Marcos to the Arroyo regimes have managed to worm themselves into the more recent Comelec of Jose Melo and Sixto Brillantes? And with cheating technology being shifted from manual to electronic beginning in 2007, is it any surprise that the most resilient high priest of cheating has always had a vital Washington connection?

Having allegedly pulled off another master stroke this year, isn’t this machine well-placed for 2016 to again deliver the vote to President Aquino orany one he anoints as his successor? Or so conventional wisdom assumes.

Aquino can dream on. TanDem and the Contra-Daya groups are mired in the Comelec and the Supreme Court where 10 or so cases they have filed since 2010 have not moved an inch. The stock market may have turned bearish and the wild boast of 7.8 percent growth (higher than China, it was loudly claimed by Malacañang only a few weeks ago) has evaporated into thin air, but Aquino remains the man to beat in 2016.

Jejomar Binay, Mar Roxas, Chiz Escudero, Jun Abaya, Frank Drilon, Alan Cayetano, even Grace Poe and Leni Robledo, form a long line awaiting Aquino’s benediction or sudden political collapse to make their own moves for the presidency.

Think of how Fidel Ramos dangled his “anointment” before some 12 ambitious types including Letty Shahani, Tiger Bobby de Ocampo and Cielito Habito, to mask similarly devious moves for a constitutional amendment that would have allowed him the second term he never got. Much more unpopular but no less zealous, GMA followed this predictable route as far as she could, but was sold out by her inherited cheating machine to Aquino.

If Aquino badly wants this constitutional amendment, it is said, he has to strike hard this year or become next year’s pathetic but still menacing lame duck.

There is another complication: Bongbong Marcos has made known what everybody knows, namely he wants to reclaim his late father’s seat in Malacañang. In short, history is being turned on its head and Aquino could be the designated victim next time around, a terrible fate he surely will seek to avoid at all cost.

Assuming that the cheating machine that has morphed deep into the shadows of the Aquino II presidency remains intact, there is the nagging question of whether it will stay loyal to Aquino or return to its sentimental home with the resurgent Marcoses under whom it reached its highest flowering. Much also depends on Smartmatic and whoever ultimately controls it.

The irony is that dismantling Smartmatic could only bring back the old and reliable manual technology that was always been the forte of the established cheating machine.

If Gloria Arroyo could be abandoned just like that, what’s there to fear in dumping Noynoy Aquino as soon as it’s clear he won’t get his second term and time has run out on the once-sainted dynasty he represents? Stay tuned for the next episode.