Comelec: No to October polls unless…

I have read some of the salient and controversial provisions of the so-called “Human Security Act” a.k.a. the “Anti-Terror” bill. Let me say this clearly that the only people who are shouting against this bill are those supporting the terrorist groups like the New People’s Army (NPA) who have waged a decades long battle against the Philippine government to the early demise of many who are opposed to their cause. So when The Freeman headline blared yesterday, “Activists Test New Terror Law” my retort to this is, go ahead and let’s find out if there are kinks in the law that our lawmakers may have missed! We need this bill to stop the terrorists.

You have to be very ill-informed if you did not know that the greatest threat to world peace today isn’t a nuclear arms race, but from mindless extremist whose only weapon of choice is terrorism, the very same kind of terror that the NPA has waged against their own countrymen because they still insist on taking over our democratic form of government and install a Maoist type of government in this country.

As a journalist, we too criticize the bad elements of the government, by this we mean corrupt, inefficient and selfish bureaucrats elected or otherwise. What this country needs today are leaders with a vision; above all, one that possesses great amounts of political will to pursue their goals. But we have nothing to hide, so we have nothing to fear. It is only those groups who have evil designs for this country who fear this bill.

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If Rep. Raul del Mar will have his way, we shall have another major elections this coming October for our barangay officials. However, let it be said that Rep. Eduardo “Eddiegul” Gullas also filed a bill seeking to postpone the barangay polls for very valid reasons. I fully concur that terms of many barangay officials especially the corrupt or inefficient ones have been unnecessarily extended; however, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) as finally recognized by the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has failed to give the Filipino nation honest and credible elections during the last May 14th mid-term polls.

There are two major examples that we should first exhaust before we should allow this Comelec from holding another electoral exercise. The first one is the non-elections of Maguindanao, where we saw on nationwide tv children lining up to vote because the candidates were giving money even to non-voters. This is not to mention the numerous irregularities done during the counting, which tells us that there was really no fair and honest election held in Maguindanao.

The second example is right here on our backyard, in the 4th District, where Rep. Ben-Hur Salimbangon emerged as the victor having the narrowest margins we have ever since in our political history. Central to his victory was when the Comelec’s Second Division declared that the 15 ballot boxes, which were sent to the Comelec Headquarters in Manila, were “not authentic”, “manufactured” and “not genuine”. Clearly the 2nd Division saw this for themselves and decided to use the C-Cimpel Election Returns that brought about the victory of Ben-Hur Salimbangon.

What many of us in the media would like to see is for the Comelec to return those 15 ballot boxes back home to Cebu and in front of C-Cimpel volunteers and the media. Let us open those ballot boxes and see for ourselves how those ballots inside the boxes were manufactured and in whose favor would it have gone to.

Let me be the first to rally our good Cebuano citizens to demand this from the Comelec so we can get into the bottom of this criminal act! I dare say that we shouldn’t allow Comelec to hold barangay elections in the 4th District or in Bogo City for as long as this machinery for cheating remains in place, for those who tried to cheat in the last May elections would certainly use the same cheating method to have their barangay officials win if the elections in October would push through.

I have already gotten the commitments of many of our media friends who were invited to the appreciation dinner last Friday night in the house of Mariquita S. Yeung. I also met my good friend, Super Bobby Nalzaro during the blessing of “M/V Filipinas Cebu” (which is the youngest Ro-Ro vessel in Philippine shipping today) and he agreed with my observations on this issue. Unless the Comelec comes clean and tells the Filipino people who really cheated in the last elections in Maguindanao or in the 4th District, then we should not hold any elections until the entire Comelec hierarchy is replaced. We’re not asking for a revamp or so-called “Musical Chairs” of the Comelec leadership. We want new faces!