NAMFREL into the sunset?

For those of you who consider a "quick count" by the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) a veritable staple of recent elections in this country, you are hereby put on notice that you may have to kick this particular habit.

It appears Namfrel is having great difficulty getting accreditation from the Commission on Elections to conduct quick count operations. If Comelec rejects Namfrel’s application to undertake such a count, then voters face the prospect of seeing a sea change in the way election results are counted.

A similar application by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting has been deferred although PPCRV was accredited as a citizens’ arm. This means PPCRV can launch voters’ education campaigns and conduct poll watching activities in the coming May elections.

But it can’t do an "official" quick count since Comelec feels the group does not have a track record. Although PPCRV has been doing unofficial counts since 1992, Comelec wants it to show proof of its capability to conduct a tamper-proof quick count.

Thus, if neither Namfrel nor PPCRV is authorized to do a quick count in the coming May elections, we will be left with only the Comelec official count which, sans automation, is not especially known for its blinding speed. This, however, is not particularly distasteful to those who suffer attacks of apoplexy come election time from the deep and abiding fear that Namfrel has hidden agendas.

In Namfrel’s accreditation petition, for instance, Comelec is citing its own resolution en banc which prohibits barangay officials and barangay personnel from acting as poll watchers during the election period. Namfrel’s lawyers question the application of this resolution to the 2007 elections on the ground that the resolution was relevant only to the 1987 plebiscite for a new Constitution. Comelec insists, however, that the resolution applies to regular elections too. This question may again wind up in the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, Comelec has taken the position that the resolution also prohibits indirect engagement of barangay officials by way, for example, of recruitment of such officials through socio-civic or non-government organizations.

This, of course, took your ordinary man-on-the-street by surprise. We didn’t know that Namfrel uses barangay officials in its quick counts. That, it seems, would be a violation of the election law. But it turns out that Namfrel does NOT in general use barangay officials for that purpose, the key words being "in general."

There is one exception, no other than Namfrel chairman Jose Concepcion Jr. who is also the Barangay Captain of Forbes Park.

Comelec has bewailed the "tremendous influence" exerted by barangay officials over their constituents. In fact, Comelec claims it has received "numerous complaints against barangay officials entering polling places and interfering in the proceedings of (Boards of Election Inspectors), thereby causing not only delay in the proceedings but also political tension…"

Is Joe Con such a "tremendous influence" over his constituents? Does he enter polling places? Does he interfere in the election process? Joe insists that he does not act as a poll watcher. Namfrel is asking for quick-count accreditation, not poll watching.

This controversy, I suspect, goes well beyond just Joe Con himself who doesn’t look like he could hurt a fly, although he does get quite animated when speaking about a cause near and dear to his heart, such as clean and credible elections. I have a hard time, though, envisioning him as barging into polling places and sowing fear and trembling in anybody. If anything, people feel concern for him since his evident passion may lead to some kind of medical emergency.

Still, we’d have to concede that those that don’t particularly like Namfrel get pretty passionate themselves. Namfrel, in their view, has influenced, if not dictated, the course of elections through, shall we say, tendentious counting.

The critics of Namfrel, by the way, are not always supporters of those whom the quick count finds to have lost in the polls. Much less are they necessarily cheaters, "golden hands," or manipulators of results. It is much too facile to think of this argument as one between good and evil, or between true disciples of democracy and obsolete practitioners of the dreaded practices of New York’s Tammany Hall.

There is good-faith concern that Namfrel picks and chooses the election returns they tabulate, in order to anoint pre-selected candidates they deem to be "worthy" of the people’s mandate. And if the results reached by Comelec happen to differ, Namfrel then uses its prodigious economic clout to pronounce the said results "tainted," and the winner’s or winners’ mandate "questionable."

That concern, Namfrel supporters reply, albeit bona fide, is erroneous and borne out of sheer ignorance about how the group conducts its count. Namfrel insists it does not pick and choose the returns it tabulates but counts them as they come in, unless their technical experts find the returns illegible or somehow tampered with.

The group does inspect the returns for any outward signs of irregularity and excludes those that bear such signs. But it does not, for example, decide to count only Metro Manila returns first, or only provincial returns first, in order to deliberately come up with desired "trends."

Namfrel does acknowledge, however, that it can only tabulate a little more than 80 percent of returns in a national election. This, we believe, could be one cause for legitimate concern, especially in a very close election when the winning margin in a presidential contest is, say, a couple of hundred thousand votes.

How the balance of 20 or so percent of the country votes could tip the scales in favor of a candidate who might NOT be the winner of the abbreviated Namfrel count. If Comelec should come out with a different result after a 100 percent count, the situation could turn quite explosive.

This, obviously, is what we have to endure in non-automated polls. I often wonder how charged the political atmosphere would be if the winner in an election would be decided by no more than a few thousand votes, as has happened in many other countries, including highly developed nations.