Winston is playing it right, but...

So finally, former Government Service Insurance System General Manager Winston Garcia has formally announced his candidacy to run for governor of the Province of Cebu. Somehow he has made the smart move of coming out in the open to seek the governorship without a national party, simply because elections is always local and therefore the national parties need local candidates to help them win the national elections.

First and foremost, Winston knows that he could never ally himself with the ruling Liberal Party, which is my book has totally failed to give Cebu the infrastructure development that we have paid for with our taxes. Last August 24 during the "Gathering of Friends" by the LP at the Cebu Coliseum, Pres. Benigno "PNoy" Aquino III proudly proclaimed that under his watch, he gave a total of P23 billion for infrastructure development for Cebu. But we challenged the president and the Department of Public Works and Highways to give us an itemized list of these projects and so far we could only come up with P2.3 billion in the last five years.

So Winston is playing it right by not having a national political party. That means, except for LP, the other parties or presidential aspirants would be courting him to include them in their slate for the 2016 national elections. But while I laud Winston for his decision to go without a national party, let me say it here that his choosing former Mandaue Rep. Nerissa Soon-Ruiz as his vice-gubernatorial candidate does not augur well with the Catholic Church.

If you ask me, Winston probably did not know that Dr. Nerissa Soon-Ruiz has a huge political baggage as one of the authors of the Reproductive Health Law, which is the backbone project of PNoy. At this point, I can only hope that Neri has had a change of heart on this issue otherwise, we will campaign against her in the coming polls.

With the deadline of the filing of certificates of candidacies coming up tomorrow, you can say that this presidential, vice-presidential, senatorial, congressional, gubernatorial, mayoral and the other elective government official race is the point of "ready, get set and off they go!" We can never predict the outcome of the 2015 presidential elections. However, I still suspect that Smartmatic International, Inc. is still up to some kind of mischief, just like what they did in the 2010 presidential and 2015 mid-term elections, which is why Smartmatic is facing suits before our courts of law.

Meanwhile when Smartmatic won the bidding for the new vote counting machines, Smartmatic suddenly changed the name of its new electronic counting machines calling it the Optical Mark Reader  instead of PCOS. So we would like to know why this sudden change of name. Was Smartmatic scared that the term PCOS has become synonymous with electronic fraud? I suspect that this new machine vote counting machine won't be different from the old hocus-PCOS that we had. This is what people always say, we got the same dog with the same collar!

Meanwhile, Smartmatic Philippines Project Manager Marlon Garcia made a boast that came out of the front headlines of the Philippine Star last Friday that the encryption key for the OMRs is different for each unit which means it is more difficult to hack. But in total honesty, we are not afraid of any hacking incident just because China allegedly threatened to hack our elections.

But that was not the issue that we accused Smartmatic or the Commission on Elections (Comelec) of the hocus-PCOS machines.

For us who have fought the PCOS machines since the 2010 and 2013 elections, the issue is what is placed inside the PCOS or, this time, in the OMR machines, which Smartmatic can tweak to favor candidates who so badly wants to win. They would pay huge amounts to the people running the OMRs to assure their victory. This is what a massive electronic cheating can do - destroy what little is left of our democracy. This is why we have always demanded a return to the old paper and pen type of voting because in that way, it is so difficult to cheat.

In fact Catholic Bishop's Conference of the Philippines President Archbishop Socrates Villegas issued a call to Filipino voters not to elect corrupt candidates to office. In his official statement, he used the message of Pope Francis during his Papal visit to the Philippines last January when the Pope said, "Corruption is the biggest cross that is being carried by the Filipino nation. Sinners can be forgiven but you cannot forgive the corrupt because they do not ask for forgiveness. They are not bothered by their actions."

So Archbishop Villegas told his audience "Let's try to keep the Pope's message in mind." But in my book the CBCP should warn the Comelec and Smartmatic not to engage in another massive electronic fraud for the 2016 presidential elections because if that happens. We might just set up a revolution that someday people would only regret because no one warned them.

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