Same political landscape

The historic first automated elections last May 10, 2010 can be considered “generally successful” only because the dreaded failure of elections did not materialize. For this feat COMELEC really deserves the nation’s gratitude. However, there is no reason at all to be euphoric about the overall election results.

While we will have a new President who appears trustworthy and promising enough to initiate the expected necessary changes, the political landscape still looks as dreary as it is now. It does not look like we will have “new dawn” that promises to bring about the longed for reforms in government and in politics. Almost the same old familiar faces and trapos will be returning to Congress or will be occupying other local or national positions. The same political warlords, jueteng lords and dynasties will still control and hold sway in their respective turfs. The future ex-President GMA will become a Congresswoman from Pampanga. Even the family of the late dictator Marcos who was overthrown by the non-violent people power revolution of 1986 for oppression and rapaciousness has made a successful comeback. The son, Ferdinand Jr. will be a Senator and his mother Imelda a Congresswoman, while daughter Imee will be the new Governor of Ilocos Norte.

Many of the fresh faces who tried to enter the political landscape carrying with them the torch of idealism and principled politics failed in their quest. Only a few of them were successful mainly because they have previously made it and were just trying to retain their positions precariously clinging to their principles. Actually these idealists and principled candidates for national and local positions thought that with the automated election system, the playing field will be level. But they were mistaken. The system only expedited the determination of the election results which are however still tainted with dirty politics. It did not do away with all the election malpractices. Neither did it prevent the traditional politicians from circumventing elections laws in order to win in the elections. As they say in computer technology “garbage in garbage out” only this time the garbage were spewed out faster.

Thus most of the proclaimed winners in the national or local levels undeniably spent a lot more than what the law allows as they started campaigning as early as one year before the elections. Their more tangible and scandalously extravagant expenditures were devoted to the media campaign ads, innumerable and oversized posters, streamers and other propaganda materials indiscriminately put up everywhere long before the start of the campaign period. Less tangible but even bigger expenditures were those allocated for vote buying which happened in all parts of the country, more especially here in Metro Manila. 

In Quezon City, my son Joel Sison ran for councilor in the 4th district. He started campaigning only at the onset of the campaign period and strictly adhered to the election laws and rules. He had a budget of P5 per registered voter in the district. He conducted his campaign mainly by personally introducing himself to the voters on a daily house to house sortie accompanied by campaign volunteers handing out leaflets containing his bio-data and platform. He avoided cluttering the entire area with his campaign posters and streamers which were prepared according to COMELEC specifications as to size and mostly placed only in areas allowed by law or in private properties and residences with the owners’ consent and permission.

Since the district is quite big, the family also helped Joel in his house to house campaign particularly his sons Miko and Johan and nephew Jigo. Worth mentioning here is Jigo Sison’s interest in politics even in his early teens as he accompanied his father Jopet who also went on a house to house campaign for Joel. Jigo was the one who constantly reminded the rest about the election rules that must be strictly followed.

He seemed to be convinced that success could also be attained if we tried our best and campaigned hard according to the rules despite the overwhelming odds in favor of candidates with money and machinery who had no regard at all for said rules and regulations. At the end of the campaign period after gauging the peoples’ reaction we indeed thought that our efforts had been enough to make Joel win.

Unfortunately, the PICOS-OMR machines callously disappointed us. They churned out figures showing that votes tallied for Joel were very much short of what is necessary for him to be in the winning circle. It is really quite shocking and disheartening especially because Joel did not even land in the winners’ column in our Barangay Pinagkaisahan and the nearby Immaculate Conception which are considered his bailiwicks because he has lots of friends and supporters there. Due to this rather questionable performance of the machines at least in the two barangays, I now understand the reason behind the proposal for a parallel manual count of votes. Indeed under the automated election system, people are not able to see or know how the votes are counted.

The need for a manual count or manual audit of the PICOS count seems more imperative after the “spate of gross PICOS error during the final field testing” due to “misaligned ovals” that IT expert Rodolfo Versola wrote about in his article entitled “A simple way to cheat with the PICOS machine” that appeared in The STAR last Saturday, May 8, 2010. Mr. Versola was talking about “a way to do targeted cheating” against local candidates through vote shaving with the PICOS machines where: “all that needs to be done is to slightly change the coordinates of the oval associated with the targeted candidate so that the printed oval on the ballot associated with the candidate is slightly misaligned with respect to the coordinates on the configuration file.” Continuing his exposition Mr. Versola wrote, “the larger the misalignment, the greater the possibilities of missing the mark on the oval. This is called a “false negative” or a “bawas”. Of course, the cheat would not make such a big change that the PICOS machine will miss the mark entirely. A consistently zero count would be too obvious and easily detected. But a slightly misaligned oval might be missed occasionally, say 1 in every 10 marks, leading to a 10% shaving of votes for that particular targeted candidate. And because configuration files are usually not considered part of the source code method, which merely involves a minor change in one configuration file, it will not change the source code. It will therefore escape detection through the usual method of checking the program “hash code”. But it can be detected if the hash code of the configuration files are also double checked. However I have not seen any Smartmatic or Comelec statement claiming that they do so.”

The Comelec should therefore pursue its plan of random manual audit. I am sure candidates like Joel Sison will readily admit defeat if they know that they truly lost fairly and squarely. But whether there is manual audit or not, what is hard to answer or really unanswerable is Jigo Sison’s question of why it pays to violate the law; why most of the local candidates who committed all sorts of violation of the election laws won. Obviously this is not a good example for our youth.

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