Probe electronic cheating

It’s been a year since Vice-President Leni Robredo won the Vice Presidential race with 14,418,817 votes or 263,473 more than Sen. Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos who got 14,155,344 votes until now the Supreme Court (SC) sitting as a Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) has yet to decide on who really won the Vice-Presidential derby.

Well finally last Tuesday; eight Justices led by Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno were present during the preliminary conference on this electoral protest. It was the first time that the camps of the Vice-President and that of Bong Bong Marcos faced each other in the PET. Frankly speaking, my only interest here is simply whether Sen. Marcos was cheated through the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) or its clone, the Optical Mark Reader (OMR) machines, which I suspect is the main culprit in that last elections.

Surely by now, you must have noticed that the issue of Russia’s hacking the US 2016 elections has continually been featured by CNN cable news and the New York Times (in their joint effort to get rid of Pres. Trump), even though no one could produce any damning evidence that US Pres. Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to win his Presidential bid.

Last April 20, 2016, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) finally admitted that their website was hacked not just by one hacker but two. One named Paul Zulueta and the other was Jonel de Asis, both 23-years old and graduates of Information Technology (IT). These are graduate IT students; one can just imagine a more professional IT expert hacking our election machines? So far, nothing has been done by the Duterte government to dig deeper into this massive cheating during the 2016 Presidential elections.

Just for the record, last June 1, 2016, I wrote in my Freeman column an article entitled, “Shall we stay silent on the Rape of Democracy?” allow me to reprint an excerpt of what I wrote in that article. “Sen. Serge also categorically stated that the best proof of the cheating can be found in the total vote count of Senate President Franklin Drilon and former TESDA Chief Joel Villanueva both of whom got around 18, 600 votes, while the most popular candidate in this elections, Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte only bagged 16,600 votes. I fully agree that certain allegations about the massive electronic cheating should be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators of this rape of Philippine democracy must be jailed.”

At this point, let me say that I’m glad that the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) polls are in the process of being postponed. I never trusted the Comelec to handle our electronic counting machines, which they left to a foreign supplier, Smartmatic. What really muddles the case between Marcos and Robredo is something I learned from a close friend of a former Comelec official who exposed the electronic cheating. This fellow unfortunately did not want the Marcoses to get back in power; hence he is not giving out any information on whether there was cheating that happened during the 2016 Presidential elections.

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