No assurance of a fraud-free poll in 2010
by Purple S. Romero, abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak | 06/28/2009 11:59 AM
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MANILA - The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) hopes to finalize the poll automation contract with the consortium of Smartmatic and Total Information Management Corp. (Smartmatic-TIM) by June 30, said COMELEC law department director Ferdinand Rafanan. But the real work in preventing cheating does not start and end with poll automation since the COMELEC still has to finish an equally important task--the cleansing of voters’ lists.
During Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the automation contract, COMELEC executive director Jose Tolentino said that since March, the poll body has purged 3.3 million inactive registered voters, including at least 58,000 dead voters. He added that the purge will continue until the end of the year.
Bloated voters’ registration lists have exacerbated cheating in the past as inactive voters are “stolen” by people working for a certain candidate. Stagnant lists have made it easier for those who are not even registered--or are not even qualified to register--to cast additional votes for a politician.
This results in legitimate voters getting disenfranchised, with their votes already cast by someone else.
No system
But the COMELEC has been having a hard time pressing people, particularly voters in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), to cry foul over disenfranchisement.
When the COMELEC issued Resolution No. 8502 on August 5, 2008 to encourage voters to report such incidents, no one came forward, even after almost a year.
“Unfortunately, in spite of the resolution’s publication and dissemination, not even a single account had reached this department. Hence, no consolidation of information of its findings was formulated,” Atty. Teopisto Elnas, director of the Election and Barangay Affairs Department of the COMELEC told abs-cbnnews.com/Newsbreak in a letter.
Election watchdogs are wanting of records, too.
Ambassador Henrietta de Villa of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) told abs-cbnnews.com/Newsbreak that according to their estimates, three percent or 1 million out of 45 million voters in 2007 were disenfranchised.
In 2004, the PPCRV tried to measure the extent of voter disenfranchisement through text messaging. But De Villa admitted they still have to set a system in place for monitoring such cases and conduct a study on the issue.
Beyond numbers
We had asked for data on voter disenfranchisement in the last four polls—1998, 2001, 2004, 2007. Our request was directed to the executive director’s office, which referred it to two other offices, one of which was headed by Elnas. We also wrote the COMELEC chair but got no response.
While the COMELEC mentioned Resolution No. 8502 as one of the actions it took to address the problem, it did not bring up the results of a committee headed by former Commissioner Resurrecion Borra.
In 2007, then COMELEC chairman Benjamin Abalos asked Borra to head a committee after he received complaints that some registered voters were not able to vote because their names were not on the computerized voters’ lists. Borra was tasked to document voter disenfranchisement and determine the causes.
Abalos then said the number of disenfranchised voters could not go beyond one million, and accused the media of exaggerating the figures.
But Commission on Human Rights (CHR) Chair Leila de Lima said the conflicts over the data should push COMELEC to include voter disenfranchisement in the framework of election reforms.
The CHR itself saw the lack of a COMELEC monitoring system. When the human rights agency launched a program to prevent voter disenfranchisement in 2010, De Lima said that they also failed to get official statistics from the poll body. “We faced a blank wall,” she said.
Various causes
Voter disenfranchisement, however, is a problem with many layers, as shown by the election cases filed by competing candidates. Court records are replete with candidates crying foul over the employment of various means that cause massive voter disenfranchisement.
When Mahid Mutilan questioned the victory of Zaldy Ampatuan in the 2005 ARMM election of regional officials, he asked the COMELEC to declare a failure of elections because the voters allegedly failed to cast their votes. Votes counted came from ballots already filled up. Substitute voting allegedly cost him the gubernatorial seat.
Nuisance candidates also trigger disenfranchisement. In 1998, Efren Cipriano Bautista, a candidate for the Navotas mayoral post in 1998, was surprised to found out that a day before the deadline of the filing of candidacy, a certain Edwin Bautista had challenged him for the position.
The COMELEC declared Edwin a nuisance candidate, but because his appeal was still unresolved on election day, the Municipal Board of Canvassers refused to canvass ballots containing the names “Efren Bautista,” “Efren,” “E. Bautista,” and “Bautista,” votes that reportedly should have belonged to Efren.
In the end, the court ruled that the canvassers should have included the ballots containing the disputed names, which added up to 21,016. Efren got 17, 981 votes. But with the additional 21,016 “stray votes,” he actually got almost 40,000 votes.
Guns and goons
In addition to these means of disenfranchisement, traditional politicians also use guns and goons to harass or intimidate voters and prevent them from voting. Election-related violence is one of the grounds in the Omnibus Election Code for the declaration of a failure of election.
This happened in the municipality of Madalum in Lanao del Sur in 1995, when the ballots containing the votes for the position of vice mayor were burned in precinct 7-A.
The race was tight between Hadji Nor Basher Hassan and Mangondaya Hassan Buatan.
The members of the BEI did not report for work in five other precincts, forcing the COMELEC Monitoring Supervising Team, then headed by Regional Election Director Virgilio Garcillano, to hold special elections two weeks later.
On the day of the special elections, however, the members of the BEI did not again show up. The COMELEC was left with no choice but to assign police and military personnel to serve as election inspectors.
No guarantee
To its credit, however, COMELEC has taken steps to prevent voter disenfranchisement from the pre-registration stage. Aside from purging voter lists, the body has worked with the CHR and the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) to enable around 40,000 inmates to vote in the 2010 elections.
The COMELEC has passed a resolution which allows inmates to vote within the BJMP premises even if they are registered somewhere else.
But cheating could still rear its ugly head in the 2010 elections, including voter disenfranchisement.
The deployment of police and military forces in polling precincts is the only option seen by COMELEC Chair Jose Melo to prevent ballots from being “hijacked,” which, he said, is the only possible way to cheat in the 2010 automated elections.
Melo admitted before the Senate last March that there is no guarantee cheating would be entirely absent in the 2010 automated elections. But he added this would only ensue because of human intervention, and not due to failure of automation.
Smartmatic spokesperson Cesar Flores assured legislators last Tuesday in the Senate hearing of minimal human intervention in the handling of the machines in the 2010 elections. He said that by the time the machines are delivered to the polling precincts, no human would yet have touched the machines.
Not unless the equipment breaks down, that is. This was one of the most controversial issues raised in Tuesday’s hearing. The repair of machines could be an invitation for possible system tampering.
Tolentino said Smartmatic has 37,884 technical support staff, plus other “technologically-capable” students from state universities on standby to fix the machines. Smartmatic would provide the technicians.
He added that they would also train 240,000 members of the BEI, who need to take and pass the Certification Test of the Department of Science and Technology.
Sen. Richard Gordon warned that this setup could open the doors for cheating. He said anyone could easily claim to be part of Smartmatic-TIM’s team and reconfigure the machines.
Tolentino replied that only members of the BEI would be authorized to go near the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines. “We would not allow anyone if they are not a member of the BEI,” he said.
The machines could also be transported to replace those which malfunctioned. “The precincts would be only five meters away from each other, anyway,” he said.
But Senate president Juan Ponce Enrile said the COMELEC could not give any assurance that the transfer of the machines would not be vulnerable to any interception from outsiders.
The hearing ended with the issue still hanging.
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