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“Duterte has brought about the conditions favorable for the rise of the legal mass protest movement as well as of the more potent armed revolutionary mass movement.”

By MARYA SALAMAT
Bulatlat.com

MANILA – The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has pronounced the elections a “success” even as it still faces a growing outcry for explanations and a possible postponement of the proclamation of “winning” senatorial bets and partylists. The Comelec has yet to provide answers to questions ranging from the “transparency” server that failed to work at the crucial hours, to the mathematically improbable behavior of votes being tallied, to persistent and worsening cases of glitches and malfunctions, down to its refusal to take actions against violations of election rules committed against the opposition and the progressive groups.

All these are par for the course, based on the “predictions” of Jose Maria Sison, founding chairperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

“As I have pointed out, he has to rig the elections because he has the power and the criminal personality and motivation to do so,” Sison said.

Prior to the May 13 elections, Sison enumerated the ways in which the Duterte administration would effect the election rigging. He said “most important of all” these is the administration’s complete control of the Comelec and the deputization of military and police personnel for electoral functions.

Indeed, as the Comelec proceeds with canvassing of the vote, protests are building up in front of the canvassing center and the headquarters of the Comelec. The election watchdog KontraDaya is calling on the people to go to the Philippine International Convention Center PICC (where the national canvassing is happening) on Friday (May 17), to protest “the worst automated election ever.”

The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines National Secretariat for Social Action (NASSA)/Caritas Philippines, meanwhile, has called for the suspension of proclamation of winning candidates in the national level until the allegations of fraud are probed and resolved.

Trends in Comelec canvassing have only reinforced suspicions that an electronic dagdag-bawas (vote shaving/padding) may be happening, and it doesn’t help that the public has no way of knowing how or if their votes are really the votes that are being added up.

Reports of election fraud, inconsistencies,  have also been coming in from all over the country, including names of administration candidates like Christopher “Bong” Go, Ronaldo “Bato” dela Rosa, and others magically appearing on receipts of voters who did not vote for them.

“The rigging also included the deployment of huge amounts of public and private funds to generate propaganda in various forms in favor of the regime and against the opposition, the use of the military and police for redtagging, mass intimidation, selective murders and splitting the opposition, extended martial law in Mindanao and declaration of trouble spots in Luzon and the Visayas,” Sison said.

Various commentators have said Duterte has thrown the playbook on usual presidential behavior during midterm elections. He and his family campaigned on all media for their slate and for their chosen partylists.

“He is driven like crazy to rig the elections by all means within his power,” Sison said in a statement.

At stake for President Duterte in this elections is control of the Senate, the lone institution that has so far eluded his consolidation. He is believed to hold sway in the Lower House, and he has previously already gotten rid of Chief Justice Lourdes Sereno.

Duterte’s intent is clear to his critics. Once he gains control of the Senate, his scheme is to establish a full- blown fascist dictatorship, by scrapping the 1987 constitution under the pretext of shifting to federalism; preventing his possible impeachment, or possible arrest and prosecution before the International Criminal Court “for his gross and systematic human rights violations, especially the mass murder of suspects in his bogus war on drugs as well as in his war on the people’s revolutionary movement,” Sison said.

Now that the elections had been rigged and Duterte’s senatorial slate is within his reach, if he can get past the growing protests, Sison said there is to be no break nor honeymoon. “Duterte will use his false electoral victory to adopt and implement more draconian measures to suppress the legal democratic opposition as well as the people’s revolutionary movement,” Sison warned.

And that is where Duterte is bound to meet his end, Sison said. Fact checkers recall a similar case in history and takes consolation from the fact that in the first case, the offending ruler was ousted. Similar to what the present-day Comelec tallied this week, in the 1978 election under the Marcos fascist dictatorship, the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) which was led by Imelda Marcos, won 91 percent of the seats of the national legislative body.

Socio-economic and political crisis in the Philippines will only worsen, as a result, and that, said Sison, will further drive the Duterte regime to commit crimes against the people and will at the same time incite the people, especially the toiling masses of workers and peasants to fight back.

Sison added that while Duterte may have succeeded in rigging the elections to swing a false victory, his own actions and polices will eventually cause his regime’s downfall. Sison said Duterte’s policies and acts of tyranny, treason, mass murder, plunder and swindling will eventually bring about the people’s resistance that is strong enough to end his rule.

“Duterte has brought about the conditions favorable for the rise of the legal mass protest movement as well as of the more potent armed revolutionary mass movement,” Sison said.

He estimated that if the elections had been clean and honest, it would have allowed the opposition senatorial candidates to win and frustrate Duterte’s greed for power and plunder. Reforms would have prevented protests.

“He gives no choice to the broad masses of the people but to unite and raise the level of their resistance.”

The post #HalalanDayaan | ‘Duterte scores false victory, begins his downfall’ – Joma Sison appeared first on Bulatlat.

“Not only did they have to be resourceful in troubleshooting the machines and in exhausting all possible means to ensure that the voting process continues immediately, but they also had to endure voters’ irk and disappointment in the resulting chaos and long lines in polling precincts.”

By ANNE MARXZE D. UMIL
Bulatlat.com

MANILA – Public school teachers who were the front liners in the recently concluded midterm elections gave Commission on Elections (Comelec) a failing grade.

Despite Comelec claims that this year’s election is “generally peaceful,” teachers who worked on proved otherwise.

In a press conference on May 14, some teacher-poll workers attested how malfunctioning machines have caused delays specifically the newly introduced voter registration and verification machine (VRVM) and the vote counting machine (VCM), the inadequate election paraphernalia and defective SD cards.

“Palpak talaga yung Comelec. The problems are not only recurring but worsening,” teacher Reynaldo Ga who served as a support staff during the election day, said.

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) slammed Comelec for “putting teachers in the line of fire with defective armaments.”

ACT National Chairperson Joselyn Martinez said 68 percent of the total reports they documented had to do with machine and paraphernalia issues.

Martinez said the complaints put into question the ampleness of Comelec’s technical preparations for the elections, and whether the billions spent on acquiring these were worth the taxpayers’ money.

Read: Machine errors worse in today’s polls than in 2016, Kontra Daya reveals

The teachers said Comelec officials only monitored the conduct of elections from their air-conditioned room. It is the teachers and the voters who saw the reality on the ground.

“Not only did they have to be resourceful in troubleshooting the machines and in exhausting all possible means to ensure that the voting process continues immediately, but they also had to endure voters’ irk and disappointment in the resulting chaos and long lines in polling precincts,” lamented Martinez.

Defective machines

The VRVM and the VCM would supposedly help make the election process to be swift and easy. However, teachers said these only made their work more unbearable.

Nestor Reyes of the Manila Public School Teachers Association (MPSTA) said VRVMs did not help at all as it only consumed time in the voting process. He said a voter has to try four fingerprints to verify her name in the list. If the name does not appear in the machine, a member of the electoral board had to verify manually from the hard copy of the voters list. He said some of the VRVMs in the school where he was designated also broke down eventually.

Reyes said so much time was consumed in the VRVM that the voting started by 9:00 a.m. The polls opened at 6 a.m. By this time, he said, the lines were long as well as the voters’ waiting time. Some voters were already angry with the delay, he said.

Not only that, Reyes said teachers were already on duty as early as 3:00 a.m. of May 13, some may have finished by 11:00 p.m. of the same day but there are teachers who were still transmitting votes up to the next day, May 14.

Ga said that she made efforts to make the voters’ waiting tolerable such as getting all chairs she could get in other rooms for the voters to sit in, finding room for the toddlers whose mothers were waiting in line and accommodate the senior citizens and pregnant women.

Ga was also the last voter in her precinct just to make sure that all those waiting in line have cast their votes.
But it seems all her efforts were futile as there were still fuming voters who blamed them for the glitches and delays in the voting process.

Despite all these, Reyes and Ga said they understand the ire of the voters. But they also stressed it was the Comelec’s inefficiency because this is the fourth time that the election is automated but the problems in 2010 even worsened.

Backstory: 2010 Elections | Violence, glitches mar first five hours of the automated elections

They added that Comelec is responsible for the heavy workload, harassment and intimidation teacher-poll workers unfairly suffered as frontliners in the election.

“The experience of teacher-poll workers is part of the established dirty and problematic system of elections in the country. We cannot blame the people to question the integrity and credibility of the 2019 midterm polls because clearly, Comelec failed to give them the kind of elections they deserve,” Martinez said.

Where’s the allowance?

Kristhean Navales of the Quezon City Public School Teachers Association (QCPSTA) appealed to Comelec to release their allowances immediately.

Navales said that some teachers were told that the allowance would be released on May 28.

There are teachers who have not received even their transportation allowance, Navales added.

Reyes said they have spent their own money for the preparations of the elections. They also spent for their transportation expenses in the trainings held prior May 13.

Accountability

Martinez said the experiences of the teacher-poll workers and voters have put the credibility of the midterm polls in question.? ?“Teachers have done their best and delivered beyond what is expected of them, as they see poll duty as a nationalist calling. Sadly, however trustworthy and dependable our teachers are, more powerful forces in society will always have the upper hand in the making or breaking of elections,” said Martinez.

Martinez also said that as voters, they are “one with the people in seeking for a clean, honest, and fair elections.”

Rosalio Ayque, Caloocan Federation of Teachers president, also pointed out that the VCM machines are recycled and not Filipino-made.

“Voting machines should be made by Filipinos because it is our votes that are at stake here,” he said.

“We stand with the Filipino people in demanding for justice and accountability behind the people who compromised the integrity of the 2019 elections and denied us of our power and democratic right to choose our next leaders,” Martinez said.

The post Teachers bear the brunt of Comelec’s inefficiency on election day appeared first on Bulatlat.

The partial and unofficial results in senatorial votes have yielded sentiments that Filipino voters are “bobotante,” a portmanteau of idiot and voter. The dismay in unofficial elections results has even led to a spike in Google Trends of Filipinos searching for the term “migrate”.

However, pinning the blame on poor Filipino voters is a lazy analysis. It fails to look beyond the elections, and it ignores the entire social, political, and economic system that perpetuates itself with impunity.

To blame the poor also assumes that everyone has equal access to information.

The truth is – it is the “analysis” the powers-that-be want us to parrot. Laying the blame on Filipino voters, especially the poor, is an attempt to legitimize the results of the election because it implies that it reflected the people’s genuine aspirations as expressed through their ballots.

“Bobotante” is a show of outrage at the election results, but it’s also barking up the wrong tree. It is victim-blaming. There is understandably a feeling of disgust with the election results. But don’t let it drive us against one other, or worse, to disparage the poor who are and will all the more be the victims of the next set of “elected” officials. Don’t let us add more poison to impunity.

Any variant of victim-blaming for the incredible election results is divisive and will only serve the “winners” of the dubiously conducted elections and the tools they have used.

Considering that this is the fourth time the country conducted an automated elections, the midterm elections prove to be anything but efficient, credible, and transparent. The seeming unpreparedness in resolving perennial technical glitches, the red-tagging and harassment of those rooting for opposition and progressive candidates, the brazen vote-buying, and the appalling use of government resources to support administration-backed candidates — these give rise to doubts, uncertainties, and questions waiting to be answered.

These also demand accountability. Rather than blame the poor and the victims, let us blame and seek solutions for this obviously flawed, foreign-patented, non-transparent automated elections system in an elite democracy.

And so the next time you’re pushed to point your finger to the Filipino voters, the next time you agree to accuse them of being bobo, search your heart if you truly believe, without any doubt whatsoever that the sanctity of every vote has been truly respected.

The post Bobotante? Not. appeared first on Bulatlat.