The ‘silver bullet’ that boomeranged

I have heard many friends say that they’re in a difficult dilemma.  If you vote, you accept a dubious election process. If you do not vote, you would have deprived a vote for good candidates. (Even if it will not be counted?) But a course of action has to be taken. To me the first is my choice as a matter of conscience and the more honorable one. The second is just as important but it can only matter if we have credible elections first. We have to make battle step by step against those who would not like the Philippines to move forward as a nation on its own terms.

But what if the PCOS fiasco is intended? What if Comelec’s actions are intended to make sure the elections fail or be indefinitely postponed. What if all this is part of a bigger plan to seize power for a revolutionary or authoritarian government without violence or force?

Here is a cautionary advice from Sun Tzu in The Art of War which would help to make the right decision “One mark of a great soldier is that he fights on his own terms or fights not at all.” Voting in a dubious election only helps promote lawlessness.

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As expected the Comelec just pooh-poohed the suit filed before the UN Human Rights Committee by 34 concerned citizens, voters, and taxpayers.

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. called the concerned citizens “election saboteurs,” “doomsayers,” and other derogatory labels.

No matter. What the UN Human Rights Committee will do about the suit is not the responsibility of Filipinos. That is the responsibility and duty of the UN Human Rights Committee if it is to be true to its mandate on human rights.

What it does do is to bring international attention to what is happening in the Philippines because of an insistence by a government body like Comelec to carry on a dubious election. The proper course of action for the UN Human Rights Committee is to find out what the facts are and whether Comelec’s insistence violates the human right of Filipinos to express their sovereignty through their votes. Moreover, it must also know what steps the citizens have already taken to address their complaints to local institutions and how these institutions have responded.

 â€œAs in May 2010 when the first automated elections were held, many voters will be disenfranchised and ALL will not see how their votes are counted. Is this genuine democratic election? Can voting and counting machines especially bereft of security safeguards really be trusted? To be more precise, have the people now entrusted their right to suffrage — and the country’s future — to a foreign-marketed system that has become illegal, uncertified, unverified, non-transparent, inaccurate and, worst, untrustworthy?”

 â€œCommitted to credible elections, compliance with the election law, and correcting the mistakes of the 2010 polls, we have for the past three years brought our concerns and proposed legislations and remedies not only to the Comelec and the CAC but also to the various suffrage committees of Congress including the JCOC for AES.

Such continuing engagements with the major institutions, however, have yielded no positive actions while the Comelec wasted three years for being too fixated on what has been proven to be an unreliable technology supplier. Likewise, we have exhausted administrative and court remedies even after winning a landmark decision on the source code review (CenPEG vs Comelec, SC, Sept. 21, 2010) that would later be overturned by Comelec’s intransigence.”

The complaint against the Comelec through the GPH is against the violation of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR),

“We are optimistic that international law — to which the Philippine government is a signatory particularly the ICCPR — will prevail.” 

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But why have so many of our compatriots missed the point of the argument against the Smartmatic-PCOS election? In her column Streetwise in Business World, Carol Pagaduan-Araullo captures the reason: “the mystique of technology especially high tech or cutting-edge technology. It was expected to be “the silver bullet that would slay the monster of the notoriously dirty, violent and fraud-ridden elections in the Philippines”. Instead we were had. After what happened in the 2010 presidential elections, the technological promise was dashed.

It is the height of irony that so much hope was given to automated elections as the way out of pernicious manual elections. It was promoted as the first step in the fight against graft and corruption. Instead it boomeranged and what was formerly retail cheating in parts became wholesale cheating through machines.

“The multibillion-peso  automatic electoral system (AES) designed and run by foreign companies and recently bought ­— lock, stock and barrel — by the Comelec does not address the major problems which have bedevilled the electoral system but in fact has compounded them.

The most important of these are the source code or the human-readable instructions to the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines and the Canvassing and Consolidating Service (CCS) have not been subjected to review by political parties and independent watchdog groups in the country as mandated by law, “Araullo writes.

“Without this review, the electorate and the people are being asked to trust blindly in the Comelec that there will be no errors — intended or unintended, human- or machine-made — of such a magnitude as to render the outcome doubtful, controversial and lacking in credibility. Comelec’s promises, assurances and claims notwithstanding, the poll body is unfortunately not in a position to elicit such blind faith.”

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But to go back to the dilemma for voters.  There will be a greater danger to the country’s well-being if we allow Comelec to subject us to the Smartmatic PCOS machine elections. As it has been said in the past, we may be barking at the wrong tree if we think that guarding or watching the elections will make any difference after the electoral body had ignored laws and rules just to make sure that Smartmatic PCOS is given a free run for the elections.

It is emerging that the Smartmatic PCOS –Comelec fiasco that began in the 2010 election is merely part of a bigger plan to seize power. It is that plan that we should challenge before it is too late.