WHEN REBELLION BECOMES A DUTY

By Ang Maestro, Ado Paglinawan
Balitaan sa Rembrandt, November 14, 2014

I am filing a motion for quick resolution of a case I submitted in behalf of the Solidarity for Sovereignty movement or S4S, to the Supreme Court in August of 2010 for the nullification of the presidential elections.

The smoking gun and bloodstains are self-explanatory in Comelec Resolution 8766 on March 4, 2010 in effect amending the Law. The Comelec cannot legislate, only Congress can amend its own act.

The Comelec under Chairman Jose Melo then collapsed all safeguards in violation of the Automated Election Systems Law and the E-Commerce Act.

Melo has since resigned and BS Aquino reappointed him as director of the Clark Freeport Zone so he does stray too far from the clutches of the executive arm that replaced him with the Liberal Party election lawyer in the 2010 presidential elections, Sixto Brilliantes.

The Brilliantes Comelec repeated the crime by reissuing the same resolution and circular in 2013, now lending the perception that not one single elective official in our motherland has been legitimately elected, with the exception of those in the barangay level that did not use automation.

Carmen Pedrosa, a known newshen, calls this present dispensation a “de-facto government”.

The AES law is unequivocally clear: “The election returns transmitted electronically and digitally signed shall be considered as official election results and shall be used as basis for the canvassing of votes and the proclamation of a candidate.”

The E-commerce Act is also explicit in requiring digital signatures in any and all electronic transactions. This is why we all have personal identification number or PIN when we use the ATM. This is to ensure that there is a human person behind the machine, otherwise the transaction could have been sourced from anywhere.

For elections, it could have simply been generated from one laptop, and this is what happened in the 2013 senatorial elections where the 60-30-10 distribution of votes to the majority and the minority parties and the independents was carved replicating the premeditated national template to the regional to the provincial to the municipal and all the way down to the clustered precincts.

In effect 2010 and 2013 winners were proclaimed and made to occupy public positions of public trust not according to law but through “unofficial” or dubious returns. This is a bizarre situation because even the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police are now receiving illegal orders from persons with falsely assumed public identities.

This is not a theory but contained in a formal report, reeking with legally-sourced statistical documentation and judicial evidences that the AESWatch and Tanggulang Demokrasya issued separately, but up to now Comelec Chairman Sixto Brilliantes has been dancing around with the usual razzle-dazzle zombie logic, drowning his audience with arrogance and impunity.

In fact, Brilliantes has recently announced that it is preparing to bid for the supply of 23,000 additional PCOS machines worth over P2 billion and the maintenance contract to service 82,000 units earlier bought from the Smartmatic that will cost the government another 1.2 billion.

Never before has Philippine democracy been repeatedly raped in broad daylight.

In a recent column of economic writer Rene Azurin, he quoted the exchange between Brilliantes and Senator Alan Peter Cayetano on September 18 during the hearing of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee:

Cayetano: “Pwede bang mangyari sa buong Pilipinas… apat lang ang binoto ng isang tao pero labin-`dalawa po ang bibilangin noong makina?” (“Can it happen all over the Philippines…that a person votes for only four candidates but the machines count votes for 12?”)

Brillantes: “Tama ho iyon.” (“That’s right.”)

Cayetano: “Did it happen, Mr. Chair, only in 2013 or pati 2010?”

Brillantes: “Nakita ho namin iyan sa 2013, hindi pa ho namin nai-check iyong 2010.” (“We saw it in 2013, we haven’t yet checked 2010.”)

Cayetano: “Then how can we decide on having a manual or automated (election) in 2016 if we can’t assure our people that walang dagdag-bawas(there will be no manipulation of the count)?… This is the first time I’ve heard Comelec admit that it can happen.”

Brillantes: “The machine is not perfect… There are certain glitches (and) deficiencies… that can adversely affect the results.”

Azurin asks, “That admission raises the question: why then is Comelec insisting on perpetuating the use of an automated election system that its chairman agrees is flawed? And why hasn’t Comelec blacklisted Smartmatic, the provider of this flawed system, and is allowing it to bid again for the supply of the election system to be used in 2016?”

My fear is that if we cannot have a revolution through the ballot like what the Americans did in their recent November 2014 elections rejecting the domination of President Obama and the Democratic Party of their government by electing Republicans to 52% of their senate, 56% of their congress and 62% of governors, then Filipinos may have no choice but to seek meaningful reforms through the bullet.

As we speak there are at least four sectors of our society in overt rebellion against this environment of lawlessness in our midst. First the information technology industry has launched Citizens for Clean and Credible Elections (C3E).

Second, Philippine bishops has staged the third national assembly of the National Transformation Council in Butuan following its previous launches in Lipa and Cebu, thereby assuming a manifestation of national character.

The students are now on board so third, the College Editors Guild and the National Union of Students are launching starting November 17, their own echo protests.

There are also feelers that the uniformed personnel has now started taking this matter seriously. In fact, I will not be surprised if this momentum culminates in another coup d’etat.  The AFP, by provision of our Constitution is the protector of the people and the State, and if it chooses to act as it did in Edsa One and Edsa Dos to truncate unmitigated lawlessness and the prospect of anarchy, especially by our political leaders, then a revolutionary government may be in the offing, intra or within not extra or outside of the Philippine Constitution.

Our democracy will be a joke without a clean and credible elections for how can we have a government the serves the common good when it is run by impostors? The castration of our electoral system by vested interests in a dangerous dalliance with our very own Commission on Election to hide it in smoke and mirrors, not only trashes the rule of law but is a tyranny of the worst kind.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion by the nation’s citizens becomes a duty.