Praying for HOPE

About four battalions of fully armed Marines and Army soldiers, backed by armored vehicles, have poured into Metro Manila over the past few days.

Those thousands of troops, under the operational control of the NCRCom, or the National Capital Region Command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, started arriving in Metro Manila ostensibly for a prayer vigil, to beseech the heavens for honest, orderly and peaceful elections or HOPE.

The AFP officers and personnel have been holding prayer vigils and sports bonding events with their counterparts in the Philippine National Police. I’m not sure how eager PNP chief Jesus Verzosa is about bonding. According to the grapevine, Verzosa continues to chafe over attempts to ease him out of his post and replace him with Metro Manila PNP commander Boysie Rosales, Philippine Military Academy classmate of AFP chief (and President’s pet) Delfin Bangit.

It’s too late to kick out Verzosa in time for election day. Bangit, meanwhile, is constantly reassuring the public that the AFP under his leadership stands for HOPE, cross his heart and hope to die.

If Bangit turns out to be an accomplished liar like his commander-in-chief, the buzz at Camp Aguinaldo is that certain military officers are prepared to arrest him if he tries anything that might undermine the vote or disrupt a smooth transfer of power at noon on June 30. The buzz is that even Bangit’s own PMA class is not solidly behind him.

With armored vehicles rolling into Metro Manila, and the AFP warning of a purported plot of communist rebels and Islamic secessionists to disrupt the polls, conspiracy buffs are seeing preparations not for the election but for its failure.

As events in our recent history have shown, you can never be too paranoid in this country where truth can be stranger than fiction.

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When the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines failed their first major test, the immediate question was whether the elections would push through.

Every time I am asked that question, my reply is that you risk a revolution – and not just at EDSA but nationwide – if you postpone general elections in this country.

For every incumbent who will benefit from a prolonged stay in a particular government position, there must be an average of two candidates wanting to take over. People expect change next week, and never mind if the change is superficial – a transfer of power from one cabal of thieves to another. As long as there are new faces, there is always hope that the degree of thievery will be reduced. Also, the window of opportunity for meaningful change is always wider at least in the first year after a new set of officials comes in.

But again, anything can happen in this land that seems to exist in a world of magic realism.

After years of carping about the interminably long, laborious manual vote count, after corruption and vote-rigging scandals, and after shelling out P1.2 billion in precious public funds that we may never get back from a private consortium that won the first poll automation contract, we are finally using machines for the first time on Monday to cast and count our votes.

What happens? Now people are demanding a return to manual voting, forgetting how too many crooks have elevated to an art form the many ways of cheating in a manual vote.

Others are demanding a postponement of the elections for at least two weeks, until all the technical glitches in automation have been corrected. I don’t know if all the glitches will ever be corrected; a new problem seems to crop up every day.

It should make anyone leery that President Arroyo’s election lawyer himself wanted the elections postponed, and that Malacañang hastily made noises about the lawyer not reflecting the opinion of his top client.

The mess has taken on the flavor of a soap opera, with Smartmatic’s top man in Manila, Cezar Flores, offering to have his Venezuelan passport “screwed to the wall” to show he did not intend to flee the country in case the PCOS machines and the elections failed.

Others are reviewing the validity of visas they have obtained from various foreign missions, just in case. I have a visa to Beirut, which these days is looking like a saner patch of the planet than Manila.

This is presuming, of course, that the airports will continue to operate in case trouble erupts. In previous major upheavals, one of the first installations taken over by armed elements was the airport.

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Shortly after Smartmatic and its local partner, Total Information Management, bagged the P7.2-billion poll automation contract, Commission on Elections Chairman Jose Melo had urged me to “trust the machine.”

The biggest plus in automation is the speedy vote count. Manual or automated, the potential for rigging the vote is present. But at least with automation, the presumption is that a drastic shortening of the wait for the results, from three weeks to just two or three days, also drastically reduces the window of opportunity for vote manipulation.

Melo also explained to me how the automated voting process eliminates an entrenched system of buying votes, wherein the buyers receive proof, as the voter leaves the polling precinct, that they get what they pay for.

Really and truly, we want to put our faith in this system. But after seeing the flash cards that had to be recalled and “reconfigured” for the PCOS machines, we suddenly realize the many ways by which we can control data stored in other devices that use memory cards, such as digital cameras.

There is also growing suspicion that the ballots were deliberately printed to disregard design specifications that would have guaranteed the seamless operation of the PCOS machines. Lawyers’ groups must take a close look at the National Printing Office to pinpoint responsibility for the sloppy printing, which also eliminated the ultraviolet security feature.

Was the sloppiness deliberate? Someone deserves to be hanged for that.

Yesterday the new speculation was that the polls would push through on Monday, but would be suspended a few hours later and a failure of elections declared.

With all the scenarios being tossed around, we should all be sufficiently prepared for trouble. On Monday, we must show the world that we can hold general elections with a modicum of order and credibility. We can still achieve HOPE.