I am not joking. Or I am joking only in the sense that I am joking when I say we’ve had a non-elected president these last nine years.
Teodoro’s actual chances of winning of course, as everyone has pointed out, are nil. That is an insult to the word “nil.” He cannot even get 1 percent in the surveys. Even if you do not believe in surveys, you have to grant at least that they have a grain of truth in them. That grain becomes an absolute boulder when you trail your rivals by a mile. Is it possible that Teodoro can still peak? Only in the same way that his boss can still become a nun.
It cannot help that his handlers whom he really ought to shoot have persuaded him to sell himself as “Gibo.” A name that openly invites all sorts of puns, not least “giba,” the Tagalog word for “wreck.”
That doesn’t include the fact that he is Arroyo’s anointed, which can sink Noli de Castro himself.
But Teodoro has two things going for him.
The first is Ronaldo Puno.
Take it from Miriam Santiago, he’s the puno’t dulo, the long and short, of pulling rabbits out of ballot boxes. He’s the fellow Miriam openly accuses of cheating her of the 1992 elections via dirty tricks hatched in the camps. I half-suspect Miriam’s railing against the early campaign ads of some candidates is motivated as well by personal reasons—Puno is one of the culprits. I half-suspect the best way to turn Miriam into a giba, or total wreck, or an unguided missile is to whisper “Puno” in her ear. Heaven truly works in mysterious ways.
If the activists are to be believed, Puno began his career in the 1960s by winning the elections held in Naga City for president of the National Union of Students of the Philippines by cheating. He subsequently helped Ferdinand Marcos win the snap elections of 1986 by the same tack. And he subsequently helped Arroyo win in the 2004 elections by the same tack. Miriam, of course, claims he also helped Fidel Ramos win by the same tack, but I’ll just leave them to their debate and God to work his mysterious ways some more.
Puno has the distinction of having served three masters who delivered this country to the, well, dogs are a decent species, as are all the categories of fauna. Let’s just say, who delivered this country to hell: Marcos, Erap and Gloria. He will also have the distinction of having provoked three Edsas, or People Power revolutions that ousted those tyrants. The last if he persists in his folly.
Which brings me to the second thing Teodoro has going for him. That is Smartmatic.
Gustavo Coronel, a Venezuelan, tells us exactly what Smartmatic is:
“The other component of the Venezuelan electoral system that illustrates its prostitution is the voting equipment, bought from a company called Smartmatic, a very mysterious outfit apparently owned by Venezuelans. This company has a very short history since it was created only in 2000. The company was a tiny outfit until an equally small company, also owned by the shareholders of Smartmatic, Bizta Corporation, received an injection of money from the Hugo Chávez regime to develop a voting machine prototype….
“Is it ethical that the Venezuelan government acquires voting machines from a company where they have or had shares? Is it honest that a huge $100-million contract can be awarded without much competition to a newly formed company without previous experience with voting machines? Can Venezuelans reasonably expect that a company having partial government ownership and having close ties with the regime can be impartial and transparent in its management of the machines?
“If the electoral officers cannot be trusted, if the voting machines cannot be trusted, if the electoral registry cannot be trusted, how can we have transparent elections in Venezuela?”
A very good question. Which we ought as well to ask about ourselves. If the Comelec cannot be trusted, if the voting machines cannot be trusted, if the regime itself cannot be trusted, how can we have transparent elections in the Philippines?
So far the criticisms of Smartmatic by the candidates have centered on the physical or visible part—the length of the electoral forms, the distribution of the right forms to the right place, the ability of the machines to transmit accurately the results of the voting. The real nightmare in fact is the software, which is proprietary, or the workings of which are known only to Smartmatic. As the IT people have shown, it’s the easiest thing in the world to imbed errant commands in the software that function like malware. These can be imbedded variously in the BIOS, the motherboard, the operating system, the flash card, or all of the above. Commands that will tick off votes for one candidate to another, which will make Garci look like a veritable saint.
Every time I hear the electoral watchdogs, old and new, calling for vigilance and proposing all sorts of watchers to watch the process closely, I think to myself: Watch what? If the cheating happens inside the machines, what on earth can you watch?
The point is to stop Smartmatic and adopt an open, transparent, inexpensive and automated, electoral count. It is not too late. There are models aplenty for this, chief of them the Open Electoral System, which is all of the above. I know the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Smartmatic. That doesn’t put an end to the protest, it only shifts it from the courts to the streets. It has to be stopped. We don’t do this, and with Puno there, and the Comelec there, and Smartmatic there, I will make a fearless forecast:
Gilbert Teodoro will win as president and Ronaldo Puno as vice president next year.
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