Philippine elections is big money

This column dug deeper into the Smartmatic-PCOS system and found there was more to it than the debate on whether we should return to manual in 2016. With the information, I would say categorically we have no choice but to discard the automated electoral system being forced on us by Smartmatic. It will not be an easy task. It demands a single minded and purposeful battle against Smartmatic, its system and the machines it has been peddling to corrupt officials.

At first, we were merely looking at big money being traded each time we had elections – money to buy votes, money to buy politicians’ favor, money to campaign and so forth and so on. The desire for good governance and the election of capable, meritorious candidates was out of the equation. Presidential elections had become a business and made millionaires even billionaires out of incompetent but popular personalities.

 After googling for information on Smartmatic’s chairman, Mark Malloch-Brown, there was more about him that we should know.

He was central to the puzzle of why Smartmatic had such power and would not yield to any investigation or threat.

Prior to being Smartmatic’s chairman, he was vice-chairman of the George Soros Investment Funds and the administrator of the UN Development Program.

Wayne Madsen of the Strategic Culture Foundation wrote that “nowhere is the Soros and CIA influence felt more than in the UN Development Program.” He said that “many UN staffers have links to the CIA” like Lynn Pascoe and Gregory Starr, both UN Under-Secretary Generals. Malloch-Brown was also the UN Deputy Secretary General.

But the most interesting item from his bio data on the UN website was that he was an adviser to Cory Aquino when she ran against Ferdinand Marcos in a snap election. He was also adviser to other presidential and political candidates, particularly in Latin America. He was once consultant for the Sawyer Miller group that advised Cory Aquino during the Imelda Marcos trial in New York. I was the spokesperson for the Aquino government during the trial.

So much for the international aspects and the big money that comes with Smartmatic actively conducting our elections. Happily, Filipinos are not entirely powerless to confront this monster that now threatens our country.

There is a solution. We can change our Constitution asap to restructure our body politic from presidential to parliamentary. Then we will no longer need automation. We will have smaller constituencies and fewer candidates and less campaign money to allow meritorious candidates from our marginalized sectors to run for elections.

At the meeting in STAR Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista admitted “If we had a parliamentary system, we would not be in such a mess.” He was, of course referring to the coming Smartmatic-PCOS election in 2016.

It was a surprising admission on his part that the current presidential system leads to graft and corruption of big money and the entry of foreign influence to control our government and political system. More developed countries, ie Germany just turned it down.

Apart from this, the current political system, as I have been repeating, limits the choice of voters to those who control the system, the rich oligarchs and family dynasties. The high cost of campaigning breeds corruption and has shut out the marginalized sectors from being fully represented in proportion to their weight.

The lack of choice, of new faces, is best summed up by the remarks of a cab driver, “Pareho sila lahat. Walang pagbabago. Sila lang merong pera. Ang buhay namin hindi magpapalit.”

For the first time, a government official in charge of elections admitted we need constitutional reform before we go through another problematic Smartmatic-PCOS election.

Let us return to the manual system or let us not have elections at all.

There is an important essay in the blog “Electronic Vote & Democracy” going around in social media.  It explains why we must shift the debate on Smartmatic PCOS from technical to moral and social issues.

“Electronic voting is unfit for political elections in a democracy and no technology can change this. But of course there are recent claims that this “barrier” has been overcome with the use of strong cryptographic techniques, homomorphic protocols, etc to achieve elections of provable (not probable !) validity…

In democracy governmental power is transferred by counting secret votes during elections. To accept such transfer people and parties must be 100% sure that electoral results are fair and square: doubts about the legitimacy of the winner can damage the political life of the country and even bring riots and revolutions…

Electoral procedures are obviously setup and managed by large organizations which span all over the country and give contracts to private and public companies…

Sitting governments are in charge of guaranteeing the accuracy of electoral results and the secrecy of votes, but the social groups and the economic powers which are the base of any government have the obvious interest in falsifying electoral results and violating the secrecy of votes to preserve power. They succeed thanks to the complete control they have over the electoral process.

The only way to guarantee fairness of elections is that electoral procedures guarantee that each vote really represents its (unknown) elector’s will.

We know we can’t blindly trust any organization when dealing with elections, thus we, the people, need to verify all by ourselves that those electoral procedures really work as they should!

Fairness of elections can be guaranteed only by electoral procedure open to the active check of the people, the so called democratic control.

Ballot paper elections can be subjected to proper democratic control because humans can check the handling of ballot papers, which are visible and tangible objects. It’s not by chance that all democracies always used ballot papers! With them a few votes may get lost, but no foreign country, terrorist group, economic or political power will ever be able to alter the final result of our elections.

That’s why ballot paper elections are suitable for democracy….

Results of any electronic vote are, due to their nature, unverifiable and no technical solution can overcome this fact!....

When ballot paper elections are held under proper conditions, the people can tally up real votes (ballot papers democratic control are hand written by electors and readable by anyone). When ballot papers are publicly counted in the same place as they were voted and when scrutinizers are randomly selected citizens (as done in Italy, for example), then who actually counts votes and declares the result of each ballot station is the public, and the central electoral service has the mere role of tallying such results…

In the hopeless aim to overcome the fact that results of electronic elections are not verifiable, some vote verification methods (like VVPAT) have been proposed, but they still are not able to guarantee fairness of elections.

Electronic vote, carried out via computer and digital links represents a poisoned chalice for technologically advanced countries; it is no exaggeration to say that it threatens to eliminate democracy as we know it today.

Not to be duped we, the people, must lift e-vote debate outside the technical arena and lay it in the arena of basic principles we all understand, the arena where we all are able to answer the question: “do we accept and trust unverifiable electronic votes or do we prefer to use verifiable ballot papers and public (transparent) and repeatable procedures?” Go figure !”