Jail them July 5, 2006

ONE of the funniest things I’ve read over the past weeks was our news item last Sunday. It said Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez opposed the idea of Election Commissioner Resurreccion Borra or, heaven forbid, his fellow commissioners being impeached. Should that happen, Gonzalez warned, it would greatly affect the 2007 elections. The public, he said, would not trust an electoral body that will have its attention divided between preparing for those elections and attending to the legal case against its top officials.

But of course, filing impeachment charges against Borra and company will greatly affect the 2007 elections. It will make them honest. What on earth makes Gonzalez think the public trusts the Commission on Elections (Comelec) now? For that matter, what makes him think the public trusts him? What makes him think he and the word “justice” have any connection whatsoever? What makes him think his utterances are of any consequence to any Filipino in his or her right mind?

If anything, the public is bound to trust more, and not less, a Comelec that is distracted by an impeachment suit against its current commissioners. At the very least that is so because its commissioners being scrutinized, or hounded by the Furies, for wrongdoing is going to make them a little more reluctant to join the ranks of the defendants if they are their replacements, or to add to the charges if they are the commissioners themselves. It is no guarantee of course -- there are no longer any limits to the brazenness with which this country’s officials screw the law, taking their cue from their boss -- but it is better than nothing.

At the very most having their attention divided between attending to their duties and attending to their impeachment, the commissioners won’t be able to devote their entire energies to screwing the voters, which is how they’ve interpreted their duty since Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo came along. To this day, they remain innumerate, unable to count anything except peso bills. My apologies to the employees in that office who remain reasonably honest, who are probably the clerks and janitors.

But Aquilino Pimentel is right: Why only Borra and why impeachment? The Mega Pacific scandal, which consisted of the Comelec awarding the bid to computerize canvassing to a patently unqualified bidder, one that had just been put together thereby grossly violating the first criterion which was that the bidder should have been around for several years, was approved by the commission en banc.

If the argument is that the other commissioners did it in good faith, then they are monumentally incompetent, or downright stupid, signing things they have not scrutinized or understood. Their good faith can only represent a bad fate for the voters, and the country at large. Indeed why impeachment when there is a simpler, more direct and complete solution to the problem, which is to file criminal charges against the commissioners? That is how it’s done in the United States, where the officials of electoral bodies are not regarded as being in the same league as the president and chief justice and deserving of impeachment.

In this case the criminal charges are more than richly deserved. The crime is exorbitant, as I’ve been saying since that scandal began, and to this day I do not know why we have not only not done anything to punish the wrongdoers but do not even appreciate the scale of the wrongdoing. What did the commissioners do when they awarded the bid to Mega Pacific?

At the very least, they set back more than one decade of hard work and harder expense to computerize voting, something that has taken several presidents, Comelecs and Congresses and many billions of pesos to trail-blaze. When it was finally there, they decided to take the wrong path, completely willingly. Computerization remains the easiest way to curb fraud. The longer counting takes, the easier it gets to mess around with, as happened massively in the Muslim South in the last elections, ballot-switching being the order of the day. Tawi-Tawi and environs never voted: Their votes were made and counted beforehand by other hands. Computerization -- in the hands of a reputable firm, which has proven safeguards, which has a track record for competence, and which stands to lose a lot from the slightest whiff of irregularity. Not Mega Pacific.

At the very most, the commissioners made it possible, if that wasn’t their intention to begin with, for electoral manipulation of epic proportions to happen in this country. If they had gotten Mega Pacific to count the votes, well, the people who should prosecute them should look into that fly-by-night’s patron and see if he isn’t the biggest crook in this country, one who knows only how to count peso bills, although he has never been penalized (or “pidalized”). As it is, by being found out to have given the award to the wrong bidder, the commissioners threw us back four years into the new millennium into the Dark Ages of ballot boxes, where goons, generals, Garcis and Comelec commissioners, who are often interchangeable, are absolutely and omnipotently free to decide who should rule this country.

Corruption is the last of the commissioners’ crimes. Engineering a fake president is first.
The public won’t trust a Comelec whose commissioners are reeling from criminal charges? It is the only way it will trust it. Indeed more than filing charges against them, make them go on leave, preferably permanently. I’ve always said the conditions for “snap elections,” which we should have well before next year’s regular one, are two. One is to dredge the Comelec as you would a canal; two is to computerize the elections. That is the only way we can have a real President, not one whose very smile is fake.

Even better, just jail them.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=8171