Tomorrow (May 11), the whole nation will witness the prostitution of the country’s justice system, unless a miracle happens, as the Supreme Court gives weight to Solicitor General Jose Calida’s quo warranto petition against Chief Justice (CJ) Maria Lourdes A. Sereno.
Even the CJ’s supporters have thrown in the towel, but will proceed with the so-called Jericho March to protest the injustice to be rendered by those who have been bequeathed by the Constitution “to render fair and just judgement.”
Alas, Lady Justice is no longer blindfolded, as she acquiesces to the demands of those who shun democratic processes. We all know where this is leading to: the total revision of history, which started even prior to Duterte’s ascension to power.
It is the Marcos family’s quest to seek redemption by totally erasing the hideous misdeeds committed by their dictator-patriarch Ferdinand Marcos Sr. against the Filipino people during his murderous regime that led to his ouster in February 25, 1986, via a peaceful people power revolution.
The Marcos family discovered a gold mine in social media, adeptly using it to condition the minds of the younger generation who are clueless to what transpired during martial law. The narrative that the late strongman Marcos is “the greatest president the country has ever had” gained traction among unsuspecting millennials who later formed the Marcoses’ political base. This unwarranted claim gave life to Bongbong Marcos’s online trolls who then began trumpeting the family’s “good deeds” in various social-media platforms.
It didn’t take long before the family found a person who would champion the family’s quest to refurbish its image: Davao Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte. Ironically, Duterte’s late mother Soledad was one of the active anti-Marcos leaders in Mindanao. The despot got Duterte’s blessing to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, the first step to the Marcoses’ bid to deodorize the family’s image.
Now the fight shifts to the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), which is hearing the election protest that Bongbong Marcos (BBM) filed against Vice President Leni Robredo. There is growing fear that, this early, the PET is showing some bias in favor of BBM.
The Supreme Court, sitting as the PET, earlier junked the motion Robredo filed to consider 25 percent of oval shading as a valid vote. Robredo’s camp earlier filed a motion urging the PET to follow the Commission on Elections’s (Comelec) Random Manual Audit Guidelines and Report. It claims that the threshold percentage in determining the validity of votes during the 2016 national and local elections was 25 percent and not 50 percent oval shading.
I find this technicality ridiculous. Whether it’s shaded 10 percent or even less, the intent of the voters was clearly to cast their lot on their preferred candidate. Why their votes have to be invalidated just because of shading issues elicits serious questions about how the PET, now possibly without Sereno, will conduct the electoral protest.
In the first place, BBM’s protest is questionable. If he were indeed cheated, then all those who won during the 2016 election were cheated as well, owing to the nature of the automated election process.
While the vote counting machines (VCM) are not perfectly tamper-proof, any form of cheating presents an insoluble task. It requires enormous resources, manpower and precise timing. For one, every vote is logged and stored into the SEALED machine at precinct level. This means that there is foundation for verification. Yes, the final results are ultimately taken from the information transmitted to the Consolidated Canvassing System (CCS), but if any erroneous or anomalous transmissions were detected, such a comparison can easily be done with the results stored in the transmission chain, from the National Board of Canvassers, Provincial Board of Canvassers and Municipal Board of Canvassers, all the way down to the information stored at the VCMs at precinct level.
And speaking of “erroneous or anomalous transmissions,” a time-delayed firewall prevents any other transmissions that are not sent within a set time interval. It would be extremely difficult to synchronize any unauthorized or altered transmissions with this system, because the system will only take specific transmissions from specific VCMs at specific times. Any mismatch among these would be immediately reported by the CCS.
In the case of failed transmissions, the system protocol is to have the results manually transmitted. While these may seem like a window of opportunity for cheating, the results still must be transmitted by transporting the entire VCM itself via a computer authorized by the system that is also under the care of the Municipal Board of Canvassers.
Speaking of VCMs, the Comelec has decided to buy, instead of rent, them. The poll body has relied on them in the past elections and found them to be reliable. They have already been tried and tested under real-life conditions.
Purchasing the machines was more economical. Consider these: For the 2016 presidential polls, the Comelec reportedly spent somewhere around P8 billion to rent almost 97,000 VCMs from Smartmatic. For the upcoming 2019 midterm elections, therefore, that figure will likely remain the same, if not higher, due to inflation.
Fortunately, in the existing Comelec-Smartmatic contract (yes, this is a foregoing stipulation of a previously signed and approved contract, so conspiracy theories about “midnight deals” have no basis whatsoever), the poll body has the option to purchase the machines for P 2.21 billion after a certain period of time. Compare the rental fee of P8 billion to a purchase cost of P2.21 billion. Doesn’t that sound like a no-brainer, in the name of prudent spending?
Furthermore, there is a clause that requires Smartmatic to fully repair and/or refurbish each VCM free of charge before the sale is completed. Accordingly, there is no risk of obsolescence or significant depreciation. The VCMs are guaranteed to be reliable for the 2019 elections, and even in 2022.
This effectively saves the Comelec over P5 billion, which it could use for other endeavors, such as voter registration and distribution of voter IDs. God knows they need a lot of help in those areas.
Of course, there will always be some pundits and armchair analysts questioning the dependability of the VCMs. This brings to mind a recent conversation I had with an insider from the administration, who confided that, thus far, the ongoing vice presidential vote recount has mirrored the exact results of the ones coming from the automated VCMs.
Now that the election machines have been bought by the Comelec, hopefully the next step is to stop candidates from buying the election itself.
For comments and suggestions, e-mail me at mvala.v@gmail.com.