EATING CROW

Telltale Signs
by Rodel Rodis

A surprise guest showed up at my birthday party at my home on Tuesday, November 7, 2006. It was Sen. Dick Gordon, who was visiting the city that day, which happened to be an election day in San Francisco. As the polls had not yet closed and at his request, I brought him to my neighbor’s garage, which served as a voting precinct, for him to observe our automated election system at work.

“We will also have automated elections in the Philippines by May 2010,” he told me confidently as he expressed disdain with the antiquated manual system of voting in the Philippines that he said took way too long and was always fraught with fraud.

As principal author of RA 9369 or the Amended Automated Election Law and the leading advocate for modernized elections in the Philippines, Sen. Gordon was determined to push the country’s election system into the 21st century.

While I respected his intentions, I was skeptical about whether automated elections could be set up so quickly without any transition phase to iron out the glitches and to ensure that the system was free from the manipulation of source codes that was said to have occurred in past presidential elections in the US.

I expressed my misgivings to Sen. Gordon back then and I expounded on those problems in subsequent columns leading up to the May 10, 2010 elections which I felt certain would result in a failure of elections. The sheer logistics of setting up 86,000 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines in 70,000 precincts throughout the Philippines and to equip each PCOS machine with newly programmed compact flash cards all in a matter of days was mission impossible.

I also questioned the integrity of the COMELEC commissioners who had allowed an obvious nuisance candidate like Vetallano Acosta to be included in the ballots and who had designated the NP-NPC “merger” as the dominant minority party even though its application was filed six months past the deadline.

And I gave credence to the conspiracy buffs who believed that Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had no intention of stepping down from power and would cling to it by oplans, fair or foul, like Noel (No elections) or Rafael (Retain Arroyo through Failure of Elections).

Well, my childhood friend, Gary Olivar, now serving as a Malacanang spokesman, delivered the comeuppance in his Manila Standard column. I felt that he was directing it at me when he wrote that “a successful election will be a slap in the face to all manner of naysayers and prophets of gloom and doom who have vainly tried to stymie electoral progress every step of the way: • the oppositionists who kept harping on a failure of elections even at the risk of ruining an already delicate exercise and destabilizing an already jittery electorate; • the IT experts who posited all manner of worst-case scenarios that might have been technically or statistically probable, but ignored the imponderables of common sense, institutional momentum, and popular will”. Aray.

I was never more relieved to be mistaken about what I thought would happen than what actually happened on May 10, 2010. I was certain there would be a failure of elections which would be followed by a People Power uprising that would be quelled by martial law and on June 30, 2010, incoming House Speaker Gloria Arroyo would assume the presidency from outgoing Pres. Gloria Arroyo. None of these occurred.

My old friend Gary is absolutely right. My worst-case-scenarios ignored the imponderables of common sense, institutional momentum and popular will. People Power 3 did not happen in the streets but in the voting precincts throughout the land.

The resounding victory of President-elect Noynoy Aquino makes eating crow more palatable.

***

Out of 90 million Filipinos, 50.2 million registered to vote and the turnout on May 10, 2010 was 85% which is absolutely awe-inspiring. And to realize that people had to wait in line for hours, like Sen. Noynoy Aquino did in a Tarlac precinct, just to vote shames those who live in the US who take voting for granted.

San Francisco has about 800,000 residents of which 451,988 are registered voters. In the last elections, only 102,061 bothered to vote, just a pitiful 22.58% of eligible voters. And more than 2/3rds of that number did so by mailing in their ballots, no lines to bother with.

Filipinos in the US are infected with the same voting sloth. Southern California is home to more than one million Filipinos and yet only 11,975 bothered to register to vote in Philippine elections. Of that low number, only about 3,600 actually bothered to vote even though most had a month to cast their mail-in ballots.

Of those who did cast their ballots, 1,834 of them voted for Noynoy Aquino for president with 477 voting for Manny Villar and only 87 for Erap Estrada. In the vice presidential race, 2,403 voted for Mar Roxas with 267 for Loren Legarda and 244 for Jojo Binay.

In Northern California, out of 2000 votes actually cast from 6,951 eligible voters, Noynoy Aquino received 1,183; Villar obtained 303 votes while Erap received 49 votes.For VP, Roxas garnered 1,401 votes while his nearest rival, Bayani Fernando, received 183 votes and Jojo Binay got 126 votes.

Because the deadline for registering to vote in the May 10, 2010 elections was August 31, 2009 before Noynoy Aquino announced his presidential candidacy, I was concerned that Noynoy may not get as many votes but I was mistaken. All over the US, more than 60% of the voters cast their ballots for Noynoy. As Erap would say, it was a “landscape”.

(Please send your comments to Rodel50@aol.com or mail them to the Law Offices of Rodel Rodis at 2429 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127 or call (415) 334-7800).