INQUIRER.net Eleksyon 2007

Smoke signal

Cebu Daily News

FIRE prevention month’s main commemorative activity was the burning to the ground of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) building. Only in the Philippines!

Destroyed were documents and evidence concerning pending and past election protests from 1995 to 2004, allegations of unethical behavior and illegal or corrupt contracts entered into by Comelec officials, and most significantly, to our mind, verification reports submitted by Comelec field offices concerning the registration of party-list and other political parties for the 2007 elections.

This is why the destruction of verification reports concerning the party list concerns us the most. The party list may not occupy front and center in the average voter’s mind, but the elections for those seats will be hotly contested. The Arroyo administration, for one, intends to prevent the election of leftist party-list representatives and elect a large number of its own. That’s because the party list is a cheaper and manageable way to help secure the House of Representatives for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and thus keep her impeachment-proof. When the much-propagandized “machinery” of the administration kicks in, no one will be able to question the mushrooming of party-list groups successfully elected and allied with the President.

We should not, however, focus too much on the fire because it’s only the latest in a series of disturbing developments. There was the discovery of three people in the National Printing Office, for example. The three unidentified (and unauthorized) men were caught in the process of copying the serial numbers of ballots and the municipalities and cities to which these were assigned. Such numbers are necessary for the preparation of duplicate ballots for cheating purposes, incidentally the kind of substitution in aid of fraud that only well-oiled political machinery makes possible.

Add to this a Comelec decision that we warned against when it was first floated, but which seems to be most likely to happen now: the declaration of the President’s pet party, Kampi, as the dominant minority party. This would entitle Kampi and not any other party (certainly not the parties in the opposition coalition, or the opposition coalition itself) to the fifth copy of election returns for senatorial and House elections (including the party list).

So when retired Comelec commissioner Mehol Sadain said he was joining a citizen’s poll monitoring group, Halalang Marangal, because “I had a sense that cheating took place during the 2004 elections but I have no way of proving it because they took me out of Region 12,” and that he felt in 2007 “anything could happen” because “the structure is still there,” the public can only agree with his assumptions. First, of the flawed conduct of the 2004 polls, and second, that all the signs point to another flawed exercise this year.

Another member of Halalang Marangal points to Defense Secretary Hermogenes Ebdane’s decision to scrap reforms instituted by his predecessor. Avelino Cruz Jr. worked to have members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines freed from election duties. Ebdane has made it clear that the military will be “flexible” in the coming elections.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Inquirer

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