For our special presentation on our talk show on Straight from the Sky, we bring you the concerns of Persons with Disabilities (PWD) and their rights during Election Day. There is a group that calls itself Fully Abled Nation sponsored by AusAid of Australia who has transformed all PWDs in this country into a potent and powerful voting bloc and this is what the group called Volunteers Service (VSPO) Overseas Bahagiran Disability Project hopes to do to encourage this minority sector to get the government’s notice. So if you don’t have a partylist in mind, please consider PWD Partylist.
Tonight, we have with us Mr. Kenneth Sotto Project Officer of VSO Bahagiran, John Paul Maunes Executive Director Gualandi Volunteer Services and Cora Clarin PWD Provincial Federation Officer of PWDs in the Province of Cebu. Accordingly, this project aims to create a special desk for PWDs so finding their precincts on Election Day would not any longer be a painstaking experience. I should know, my sister Adela Kono is a PWD and we have the same precinct at the 3rd floor of the Cebu Normal University (CNU) which has no elevators…so we have to carry her up to the 3rd floor and I’m sure this is happening all over the country for PWDs.
This show was taped last Thursday and it came to me as a relief that finally the Comelec did something right for minorities for a change. Then I got a frantic call from my sister Adela last Saturday that no less than Comelec Commissioner Grace Padaca had pulled the plug on this project saying that there were really not that many PWDs in Cebu City. Frankly speaking, I need to get into the bottom of this… but in the meantime, please watch this show on SkyCable’s Channel 61 at 8:00PM with replays on MyTV Channel 30 at M-W-F.
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It’s seven days to go before the May 2013 elections and yes, the Comelec may claim that they are ready for the polls because they really have nothing else to say. Just imagine if they announced to the public that they are not yet ready? It would cause a great howl all over the country. So right now, I feel like being inside the classroom taking a difficult examinations and then the teacher suddenly shouts, “Ready or not please pass your papers!â€
Allow me to paraphrase my good friend Chit Pedrosa’s column in The Philippine Star, which she posted on her Facebook, “Comelec’s insistence that everything is ok and ready for May 13 is a lie. Why is Brillantes insisting that it’s all systems go? We read about PCOS machines that are missing and others are not working. As for the source code, he has today said the source code can be reviewed but not the one for 2013, only the 2010.â€
You have to be totally ignorant of what’s happening around you if you accept that the Comelec is ready. Perhaps they are only ready to cheat in the May 2013 elections. Please don’t ever forget that the Comelec is just another corrupt government agency no different from most corrupt agencies.
If you were not yet born in February 1986 during the snap elections of between the Marcos Dictatorship and Cory Aquino… the game changer was when the computer programmers at the Comelec’s election center at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) walked out in protest to the massive cheating…which then triggered a mass of people going to EDSA in revolt against the Marcos Dictatorship. History was made.
But was there any investigation against the Comelec when Tita Cory became President? Nope, she was already comfortable in having taken over the reins of government from the Marcoses. Hence, no one from the Comelec was admonished or even punished (even if they had the evidence on hand) for cheating in the elections. Not even an investigation why this happened or who was the mastermind in that cheating. As Chit Pedrosa correctly pointed out, “The Smartmatic-PCOS election fiasco may be a blessing in disguise. It has forced us to question the system through which we choose our leaders.â€
Again let me repeat what we are learning from this fiasco. France, Germany and India have enacted laws never to go into electronic voting again. The United Kingdom and Canada have always kept their manual count but with a difference… in 24 hours, they know who are the winning candidates. So let’s ask the question, why did Comelec shift to an electronic voting system? The answer is quite elementary, my dear… corruption! What kind of money can the Comelec get from the purchase of paper or other election paraphernalia? But a computer voting system meant that the Philippine government would have to spend billions of pesos.
Anyone in the IT Industry would tell you never to purchase a three-year old computer. But under Brillantes with the aid of the Supreme Court, we purchased those used PCOS machines… and someone definitely made money there. This is why the Comelec has rejected the suggested manual count and even reduced the Random Manual Audit (RMA) to one per precinct instead of the five because it would show that the PCOS doesn’t work!
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Email: vsbobita@gmail.com