By NEIL A. ALCOBE
THE MANILA TIMES
THE MANILA TIMES
CIVIL society groups led by Tanggulang Demokrasya (Tandem) on Thursday slammed the Palace for its alleged “ineptocracy hidden behind a display of arrogance” for washing its hands of any culpability in the alleged electoral fraud.
“Now they want civil society, whose taxes they are already spending recklessly, to fix their trail of incompetence,” Adolfo Paglinawan, a political activist and convenor of Solidarity for Sovereignty, said.
He was reacting to the statements issued by Malacanang rejecting a recount of votes and the Commission on Elections (Comelec) that it will hold a recount if Tandem will pay the costs.
“Palace spokesman Edwin Lacierda said the 9-3 victory for the administration speaks of credible elections. On the contrary, how can an election be credible when that output was precisely not due to any actual canvass of electoral returns but the product of pre-programming?” Paglinawan asked.
The ad hoc technical working group of Tandem, AES Watch, Solidarity for Sovereignty and other civil society groups claimed that the 60-30-10 votes distribution was observed in the national, provincial, city and municipal levels. The pattern also showed up in the clustered precincts that were subjected to Random Manual Count.
“What in effect this showed, as a matter of political analysis and no longer mathematical, is that the administration’s real ticket favored nine PNoy and three UNA candidates, in effect Malacanang winning a 12-0 slate,” Paglinawan said.
He added that this proves that the administration dumped Ramon “Jun” Magsaysay, Risa Hontiveros and Jamby Madrigal after using them as “props”, substituting in their stead Nancy Binay, JV Ejercito and Gringo Honasan.
“Now how can that be credible when the sociographics, the geographical nuances vis-a-vis ethnic preferences, and established bailiwicks of other candidates, gave way to a 60-30-10 formula? What was worse was the established behavior of the assigned votes of the nine PNoy candidates compared to the peaks and valleys of the votes of the three UNA candidates – where PNoy goes up, UNA goes up, where PNoy goes down, UNA goes down, always running in parallels and never intersecting each other like two persons dancing the cha-cha and never stepping on each other’s toes,” the political activist added.
Paglinawan said that Lacierda’s claim is statistical improbability at its most obvious manifestation.
“For instance in Mindanao, the 60-30-10 pattern was true in the cities of Zamboanga, Ozamis, Valencia, Mati, Davao City, General Santos, Bislig, Cabadbaran, Cagayan de Oro, Digos, El Salvador, Kidapawan, Koronadal, Tandag, Tangub and even Isabela in Basilan,” he added.
“In the Visayas, the province of Bohol was most revealing – Tagbilaran City and all of Bohol’s municipalities were dancing to the 60-30-10 tune. At least when Gloria Macapagal Arroyo cheated Fernando Poe Jr. (in 2004), the dancing was confined to an 80-10-10 cadence but only in four provinces, namely Pampanga, Cebu, Iloilo and Bohol. This time in 2013, the Malacanang rap was absolutely crass and brazen,” he said. “The peoples’ votes are sacrosanct. All civil society wants is a clean, honest and transparent manual count. Let’s not fuzz around about P200 million for the common good. After all, the Melo and Brilliantes Comelec have already spent more than P10 billion in sheer folly!”
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‘Election results pre-programmed’
Comelec employees manually count ballots. File Photo
MULTI-sectoral groups led by Tanggulang Demokrasya (Tandem) on Tuesday called on the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to manually count ballots in 78,000 precincts as they claimed that a “template” appeared to have been used across the country, making the results of the May 13 elections “good as trash.”
Adolfo Paglinawan, a political activist and Convenor of the Solidarity for Sovereignty, said the 12 senators who have already been proclaimed by the Comelec were “digitally-elected.”
He maintained that massive poll discrepancies included the pre-programming of the election results.
“The startling revelation towards the end of May 2013 that the sixteen canvasses for the 2013 senatorial elections revealed a 60-30-10 linear pattern throughout the country started a nationwide debate that could not be confined among IT [information technology] practitioners and professors of mathematics and bloggers,” Paglinawan said.
The pattern meant that 60 percent of the votes went to administration candidates, 30 percent went to the opposition coalition United Nationalist Coalition (UNA) and 10 percent to independent candidates.
“That nine Team PNoy and three UNA candidates were winning was not at all alarming because that was what the final Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia surveys suggested.
What was controversial was that it was a most unlikely event considering the ethnic fractiousness of the Filipino voting population and the archipelagic nature of the country’s geography,” Paglinawan said.
According to him, for the first time in the history of Philippine elections, from Aparri to Jolo, the votes appeared like a template. The national pattern was also observed in the regional level, with most provinces having the same numerical behavior.
While monitoring the incoming canvasses during the wee hours of May 14, Paglinawan said the standings of the 33 senatorial candidates were showing what he called a “linear pattern much like a flatline”, remaining substantially the same from the first canvass to the latest canvass.
For his part, Jun Estralla, an information technology (IT) expert, said that based on their observation, the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS] machines were already loaded with a program that was transmitted to the transparency server from the municipal, provincial and national level.
“There is only one program and those who are behind the program did not consider the landscape of an area since it can’t be denied that every politician has his or her own baluarte (bailiwick),” Estralla said.
Paglinawan, who came home from the United States to vote, said the respective bases of the 16 canvasses released by the Transparency Server through Rappler.com, indicate that data were coming from “batched” provinces, cities and municipalities and other areas.
“In fact, by sheer batching, a serious and glaring anomaly is already happening because the canvasses were not randomly being received by the Transparency Server but were being shortstopped somewhere, at the very least batched but as such already exposed to human manipulation,” he said.
The political activist said the process was an indication of an “insidious program defaulting the reception of raw canvass from the field, in favor of a pre-programmed 60-30-10 forward vote distribution relayed to the server.”
The group offered to deploy some of their “top people” to help the Comelec evaluate the canvass reports.
Tess Baltazar, Tandem chairman, said a manual count is the only way to appease the people’s “righteous indignation” since the results of the automated elections was inconclusive.
“The automated output is as good as trash. It is impossible for it to reflect even a hint of the actual votes of the people; the situation definitely demands for the need for a complete manual recount, at all levels; the perpetrators of this massive fraud, including the Comelec, that legislated the opportunity for the criminal act, must be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law; and an entirely new method of election must be used for the barangay as well as the 2016 elections,” she said.
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