Ending poll fraud

Four years after the midterm elections, and several years after he was first implicated in a corruption scandal involving a broadband network deal with ZTE Corp., Benjamin Abalos was finally placed under arrest yesterday and held without bail.

As of last night the former chairman of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) was at the Southern Police District headquarters, where he is expected to occupy the detention cell that was originally refurbished for former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Abalos turned himself in to authorities and there was no need to place him in handcuffs. He had tried to surrender as early as last week amid reports that a case against him for electoral sabotage would be filed in court. The case is in connection with allegations of vote rigging in North Cotabato in 2007.

The crime of electoral sabotage carries a life term. A defendant is normally denied bail, unless the evidence is deemed weak, in which case the complaint shouldn’t even reach the courts.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson introduced the new crime in an amendment to the election code, in hopes of putting an end to chronic cheating in all electoral exercises in this country.

Will Lacson and those who approved the amendments see their hopes realized?

The test will be the filing of cases in court against Abalos and other Comelec officials as well as Arroyo, who is accused of ordering the 2007 cheating on behalf of administration candidates when she was president.

How the cases are handled will go a long way in discouraging poll fraud.

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The midterm elections are just 17 months away. By now the Comelec and other concerned parties should be preparing for the polls.

After the automated general elections last year gave Filipinos the first taste of knowing the results of a presidential race within hours after the end of voting, there’s no returning to the laborious system of manual vote tallying.

But the Comelec has to decide soon whether the same automated system, provided by Smartmatic, will be used, or whether a new bidding must be held for a new one.

Among the considerations in conducting a new bidding is to stay one step ahead of anyone who might have studied the Smartmatic system well enough to manipulate the results in future elections. After winning the contract, Smartmatic executives had insisted that this would be too difficult to pull off.

If the Comelec decides that it wants a new system, we have seen how long the process can take, from bidding out the automation contract to the delivery and testing of the vote counting machines.

Precinct “clustering” in the first automated elections also caused long lines at the polling centers, with people waiting for up to four hours to cast their votes. That was something that didn’t happen in manual voting, and which the Comelec must ensure will not be repeated in 2013.

In addition to fine-tuning poll automation, there are many other matters that need to be addressed. Voters’ lists must be cleaned up. I’m still waiting for my voter’s identification card, many years after the Comelec collected biometric data from voters.

The Comelec cannot be completely helpless in regulating campaign finance. There are laws and rules governing campaign donations and expenditures, and they must be enforced, even if haphazardly. There must be ways of enhancing the Comelec’s capability to enforce caps on candidates’ expenditures and to stop premature campaigning.

Local races are traditionally the most violent in this country. The Maguindanao massacre in 2009, which stemmed from a clan feud over local government positions, was just the worst manifestation of the use of murder to eliminate election rivals. This early, law enforcement agencies, in coordination with the military, should draw up measures to minimize if not completely stop poll-related violence.

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A more difficult mission is to eradicate vote buying. Automation eliminated one way for vote buyers to verify if they got value for their money, but it didn’t completely stop the practice. In my recent travels, a foreigner who had worked with non-government organizations in Mindanao during elections talked of personally witnessing politicians openly knocking on the doors of village households and offering money in exchange for votes.

This system of undermining the vote may be discouraged if someone actually gets punished for poll fraud. So far there has been no significant case.

Instead what the nation has seen are politicians getting away with stealing the vote, occupying positions obtained through cheating, almost until the end of the term. In such cases, even if the electoral tribunals, which work as slowly as the judicial courts, decide in favor of the real winner, the loss is irretrievable.

Arroyo, who is suspected of stealing the vote in 2004, finished the six-year term, with the accusations of fraud never established beyond reasonable doubt.

The amendment that paved the way for the creation of a serious crime called electoral sabotage cannot be applied retroactively to the “Hello, Garci” scandal in 2004, although those implicated in that case can be indicted for lighter vote-rigging offenses under the election code.

In any case, the 2004 scandal does not have a Lintang Bedol, the former election supervisor for Maguindanao, to talk about how any alleged cheating was done. Former Comelec commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, believed to be the “Garci” in that tapped phone conversation with a woman believed to be then President Arroyo, has sent word to those urging him to talk that they can all go to a very hot place.

There’s still the 2007 electoral exercise that can serve as a test case. Until people see that vote rigging does not pay, every electoral exercise in this country will be tainted with fraud.