A suggestion to nullify the May 10 elections?

If a lot of Filipinos have never been happy with the 1987 Constitution it is because it was half-cooked or half-baked by Cory’s friends harboring a Martial Law hangover. In so many columns that we’ve written in the past 20 years, we’ve come up with a list of problems that we Filipinos have been having with the Cory Constitution and apparently the list gets longer every day.

On top of this list is the reality that despite having that Martial Law hangover, the framers of the 1987 Constitution apparently, albeit unfortunately, believed that a single six-year term for the president was enough. Obviously because of their undue haste in making this Constitution, no one ever thought that the president could be deposed or die in office.

Thus when the vice president takes over (as in the case of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo when she took over the rest of Erap’s term) no one ever imagined that a sitting president could sit for as long as nine years like what GMA has done. Hence, as we’ve written so many times before… we should go back to the time-tested four-year term with another four-year re-election for the president. Then of course it is always better for local government officials also to be voted for a four-year term because now we can see that only corrupt Comelec officials “profited” from having too many elections!

Then there really is no real provision to prevent a former president (even one who was convicted or deposed) from seeking another term as president. This is why I don’t blame President Arroyo for running as congresswoman in Pampanga. If the framers of the Constitution truly wanted the president to totally retire from public office, then they should have clearly put this in the Constitution. Again, haste makes waste!

Another gaping hole in the Cory Constitution is that stupidity called the party-list system, where the truly marginalized sectors like my sister Adela A. Kono’s organizations for the disabled could never hope to win, hence they are not represented in Congress via the party-list groups. Might as well put a stop to this nonsense that only resulted in the increase of the size of our ballots that look more like tabloid newspapers!

Today, we are in the midst of having historic automated polls. However it was only good for the first 48 hours because weeks later, we still could not ascertain who won the vice presidency. With all the mounting complaints from losing candidates, plus the revelation of the 86-member foreign observers who declared that the May 10 elections “were neither honest nor credible” plus the fact that Smartmatic’s PCOS machines were woefully inaccurate (imagine, it registered a total of 256,733,195 voters when our registered voting population is only 51,292,465) we could be facing the prospect of having the May 10 elections nullified! This is not a farfetched scenario.

This brings us back to the 1987 Constitution, which has no provision at all if elections are nullified. This is not to mention the controversy over the appointment of the Chief Justice, which hounded most of the election campaign, which would have left a vacuum of power if there were a failure of elections. I just hope that the incoming Aquino administration would correct such problems through legislation.

Meanwhile, I was able to interview former Sen. Kit Tatad for my TV show which comes out this Monday and he had an interesting, albeit radical proposal that he wrote entitled “A Proposal to Nullify the May 10 Elections.” Since it’s four pages long, I will reprint only the important parts of this article.

Sen. Tatad wrote: “In 2009 in Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled electronic voting was unconstitutional. The court held that the voting machine does not make it possible for the voter or the voting board to reliably examine, when the vote is cast, whether it has been recorded in an unadulterated manner, or whether when transmitted it has been accurately transmitted in its unadulterated form. Democratic elections, the court pointed out, are democratic only when they retain their public character. That is to say, when the public, beginning with the voter, can see and authenticate every essential step of the election without need of special expertise.”

We have already written here that the Comelec removed Section 7 of the Omnibus Election Code that specifies an audited paper verification system, which was originally in place when the public tested the machines and was mysteriously removed. Sen. Tatad added: “By disabling the voter’s verification mechanism, the Comelec made the voter completely blind to what the machine did to his ballot after he had put it in. Thus, no voter who voted last May 10, from the President of the Philippines to the lowliest individual could state for a fact that she or he knew that the machine had read her or his vote right. This totally voids the voting.” Sen. Tatad said he would ask the Supreme Court to nullify the May 10 elections, which should open a Pandora’s box of problems. I don’t like it because the Constitution has nothing on this!

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