Atienza has a witness and documentary evidence

It is good that Comelec should begin recounting the votes for mayoralty candidates in Pasay. Other protests should benefit from the recount. But it is not that simple in the tortuous ways in which the first automated elections were conducted.

Indeed, if former DENR Secretary Lito Atienza filed his protest on May 17, 2010 why is his case being constantly put off? Consuelo Dy, the losing candidate in Pasay filed her protest on May 25, 2010. Is there something going on here to consider recounting the Pasay vote first? The principle involved here is to respect the queue and the order in which the protests were filed.

On Wednesday September 29, Atienza and his followers will troop to the Comelec and plead to start the recount even only with the ballot boxes that were soaked while in storage at the Museo Pambata. The attempt at sabotage is worrying.

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And this despite Comelec saying earlier that the protest of Lito Atienza against Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim would be the trial case of other suits pending before the commission. “Whether or not Atienza can overturn Lim’s margin of 214,816 votes after he garnered 181,094 votes against Lim’s 395,910, the protest will validate either the stated fears of losing politicians that the results of the first computerized elections were compromised or it will prove that our first computerized polls was a triumphant success,” a report added.

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In her protest, Consuelo Dy cited “defective compact flash cards and election returns (ERs) were wrongly credited to candidate Antonino Calixto.”

Let us compare the Comelec resolutions dealing with Atienza’s and then with Dy’s. In Comelec’s own words when it gave way to Atienza’s protest: “The protestant has enumerated the protested precincts in his petition and has substantially specified the alleged acts or omissions constituting electoral frauds, anomalies and irregularities that were supposedly committed therein, and the same are serious enough to necessitate the opening of the ballot boxes to resolve the issues raised in the petition.”

Despite the glowing words of the Comelec decision and assuring Atienza that his case will be taken up first, it then goes ahead to skip Manila and make the first recount in Pasay.

By the way it is worth noting that Comelec gave a similar response to Dy as it did to Atienza, so why were they making Pasay first?

“Pasay would be the first protest suit to be handled by them after the conduct of the automated election system (AES) in the May 10 national and local polls because a reading of the election protest will show that . . . protestant was able to show in detail the alleged electoral frauds and irregularities which she thinks were committed during the voting, counting and canvassing of votes including the alleged massive vote-buying.”

However, and this is ominous, a report said Dy will not be presenting any witnesses to support her while Calixto’s camp can and will include “representatives of Comelec and Smartmatic.” You can almost predict what will happen.

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Atienza has a stronger case. If we are talking here about a test case, it goes without saying that Comelec will want a weaker case to go ahead of a stronger case.

The basis for the Atienza protest is the results of the Random Manual Audit conducted by the Comelec itself through RMA chair Henrietta de Villa. If Atienza loses his case the Comelec would have to reverse its own findings.

The reports showed that the RMA noted “large variances for the Manila mayoral race that were allegedly due to voting-machine error” and specifically pointed to Manila mayoral race that “showed problems in the counting.” The variances were in double digits and these represented only a few random precincts. What will the variances be then if they looked into all the precincts and ballot boxes? RMA could not explain the large variances.

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But even more damaging to Comelec-Smartmatic, Atienza has a witness, Nilda Reluya whose story was not aired properly in media despite a press conference in which she told her story.

She works at the Mayor’s office for data processing. On April 26 or thereabouts, she and other people working in the room were told to leave because some lawyers from the Legal Office were going to use their computers. “Go to SM or somewhere as this will take some time,” they were told.

She didn’t. Instead she lingered but made herself inconspicuous. There were 11 computers in all, 8 in a front row and 3 at the back. When the others went out of the room, someone at the back told her to use Mozilla Firefox to give her access to other websites. She saw with her own eyes what was being transmitted – the names of candidates from president down to councilors and corresponding number of votes by their names.

She scrambled to photograph her discovery even using her cellphone to document her discovery. The persons from the legal department forgot to erase the date of the transmission — April 26. To whom were the transmissions being made? Indeed the other transmissions were from that date up to but not on the day of voting itself May 10 — April 29, May 6 and May 9. She told her other companions of her discovery but they shied away from the issue, would not support her and frankly said they do not want to lose their jobs. She is treasurer of the Rotary Club of Malate and she encountered the same resistance from friends who told her that she would only get into trouble for her discovery.

“I also have children and I need a job but something told me that I must go ahead and did,” she told me in a telephone interview. It took a lot of courage for her to appear in a press conference with her findings but her story was not printed.

We have much to be thankful that there are still people like her who care for the country. She was willing to take all the risks. I told her that she had become larger than herself because she may have been chosen for this task without her even knowing it. That is why she had all the bravery and the quickness of mind to document the findings that fell on her lap.