Namfrel scores snail-paced Lanao count

More than a week after the elections, votes in Lanao del Sur in Mindanao are still being counted at the precinct level, prompting the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) to criticize poll officials.

A Namfrel statement said yesterday that election inspectors in at least 14 Lanao del Sur towns are still counting inside precincts or, worse, are just starting to count.

"Some municipalities are counting at the rate of 10 precincts per day and the process is often being suspended," said a Namfrel official. "We call this stop-and-go counting."

This developed as Sen. Robert Barbers vowed to resign as senator if his political opponents in his home province of Surigao del Norte could prove that the election there was rigged to favor his two sons and other administration candidates.

Barbers said that claims of electoral fraud in Surigao were aired by local candidates "who are used to dirty practices during elections and just could not accept their defeat."

Barbers’ two sons – Ace and Lyndon – won the election for congressman and governor, respectively, in Surigao del Norte. And two other members of the administration’s People Power Coalition also won as congressman and mayor of Surigao City and trounced traditional kingpins like Rep. Baby Navarro and former Mayor Jose Sering.

The senator pointed out that former Gov. Francisco Matugas, who lost to the re-electionist Ace, had petitioned the Comelec to place Surigao under its control.

"We did not object. We complied with it because we are committed to uphold the sanctity of the ballot," he said.

However, he chided Matugas for not respecting "the will of the people." Matugas’ brother Ernesto lost to another Barbers’ son.

"They (members of the Matugas clan) cannot accept that Surigao del Norte is no longer ruled by the Matugases or the Serings."

Former poll execs in ‘dagdag-bawas’?

Meanwhile, former Comelec officials are being eyed as mastermind in "dagdag-bawas" or the padding and shaving of votes in the last elections.

Comelec Commissioner Resurreccion Borra confirmed this as he supported the report of Senate President Aquilino Pimentel Jr. that "judases" in the poll body were responsible in election irregularities.

He said he will reveal the names of the former poll officials once Pimentel’s report is validated.

"As soon as we have the proper documentation and validation we will expose them because we don’t want the institution’s name to be tarnished by former officials who would like to earn money even if they are no longer with the commission," he said.

Based on initial reports, Borra said former provincial election supervisors were involved in "dagdag-bawas" in different provinces. Theses supervisors, he said, were paid by some candidates to cheat in the 1995 and 1998 elections, particularly in Mindanao.

He said both opposition and administration candidates benefited from the cheating.

"I would say everybody wants to cheat to win," he said.

The Comelec has been urged by civic groups to look into reports of dagdag-bawas in the last elections.

The Namfrel, for one, said vote padding and vote shaving were evident in the provinces of Iloilo, Leyte and Biliran, favoring some senatorial candidates.

In other developments, the Comelec canceled on Monday votes from two towns and 28 villages due to problems that included violence, officials not showing up on election day, and grenades tossed into a storage shed where boxes of marked ballots were being stored.

Comelec Chairman Alfredo Benipayo said final results from the May 14 elections could be further delayed if the number of ballots might affect outcomes of the polls. The two towns, he said, have a combined 22,000 registered voters.

In Samar, a report from the Namfrel confirmed allegations of discrepancies in the counting of votes.

Wilberto Honey, Namfrel provincial head, said "major and minor discrepancies" were seen in the serial numbers of ballots from 24 Samar towns. – With Efren Danao, Pia Lee-Brago