All Talks

Talks of massive cheating and systematic fraud have pre-emptied the scheduled national canvass of presidential and vice-presidential candidates in Congress. The congressional panel involved in the canvass have shown a propensity to question every glitch and discrepancy in the preparation of electional returns and certificates of canvass. The Comelec effort to manage an orderly election process is not only in question, but it has to pass the strictest scrutiny from a congressional body whose constitutional mandate is to insure that the winning candidates are anointed and proclaimed before the outgoing President leaves office.

Definitely, the on-going hearings in the Lower House to hear electoral complaints add to a perception of distrust in the May 10 elections. And this has contributed to the on-going confusion in the joint congressional task to canvass the votes.

Until now, there is just a build-up of talks and tales of syndicates offering to cheat the elections and make candidates win. Anyone can just come out and build a tale of cheating and fraud. Proofs of these allegations are difficult to find from people who are the sources of these talks of cheating and fraud.

Meanwhile, Comelec and Smartmatic offficials have not hidden from public view and have faced their critics. They are out there, in the hearings and the joint canvassing panel in Congress, trying their best to answer and explain the automated election process.

Expect glitches to occur, since this is the first elections where the country sought the technology of automation to speed up the counting process and prevent massive cheating that usually happened in past elections.

The teachers who comprised the board of election inspectors and the workhorses in the last elections, may not have been perfect in their work. They may have have erred in some of the tasks that they have to do during the day of the voting. But it should be noted that this is also the first time that they are dealing with a new technology to automate the election process. Glitches are expected. Repeat, glitches are expected. Unless there is a deliberate attempt to transgress any rule or procedure, so massive in scope as to manipulate results, then any delaying tactic that is going now in the national canvass to check every nook and cranny of the 2010 election process, is justified. But so far, more than two weeks after the polls, nothing has been found to prove that a systematic manipulation of the May 10 polls has occurred.

It is now up to the Senate President and the Speaker of the House who handle the national canvass procedure, as well as the chairman of the House committee on suffrage and election reforms, if they can control or stop the slow undoing of the election process last May 10, or they can fast-track what they are doing and save the people's mandate that was realized and is already known.