Pandora's box February 5, 2007
MANILA, Philippines--FE DOLOT, president of the Legazpi City Public School Teachers and Employees Association, had an urgent letter to the editor last Friday. In her letter, Dolot attests to the genuineness of the vote count in Legazpi after the May 2004 polls. In that count, Noel Rosal won as mayor with 44,792 votes while his nearest rival, Michael Imperial, lost with 33,747 votes. Rosal is currently the mayor of Legazpi.
What compelled Dolot and her group to write that letter is that Rosal's legitimacy has been challenged by Imperial and has been upheld by the Comelec's Second Division and then by the Comelec en banc. The case is now pending before the Supreme Court.
What happened was this: After the May 2004 elections, the counting of the votes for mayor was done in full view of the public and duly signed by the teachers. The count produced the results above. No one complained about any irregularity in the counting. No one among the watchers, including the representatives of the candidates, said the teachers called out the wrong names from the ballot forms. The counting was clearly, transparently, unassailably aboveboard.
Now comes the curious part. When the ballot boxes got to the Comelec, Imperial challenged the count, claiming that many of the ballots were fake. When the Comelec Second Division opened the boxes, lo and behold, its members did in fact find a host of fake ballots. How in God's, or Beelzebub's, name those things got in there, only they know. The public school teachers at least are absolutely certain the fake ballots were not there when they turned the ballot boxes over to the Comelec. They know that for a fact because all the ballot boxes bore their signatures certifying them to be authentic. The fake ballot boxes the Comelec "discovered" in their premises did not carry those signatures.
And still comes the curiouser, or more ingeniously devious, part. The fake ballot boxes did not contain votes for Imperial, they contained votes for Rosal! So, putting on the face of stern benignity, the Comelec Second Division and en banc, in sync ruled to blot out the obscenity--the fake ballots--from the face of the earth. And, lo and behold, Rosal ended up with 30,517 votes and Imperial with 32,660 votes. Ergo, by the Comelec's reckoning, Imperial is the rightful mayor of Legazpi City, a matter the commissioners have now laid out before Solomon, also called the Supreme Court, to adjudicate. Ah, but truly, they add whole new meanings to the word "commissioner."
Dolot laments in her letter: "The ballots that were counted by the division were obviously tampered with as they did not bear our real signatures as members of the BEI. This prompted us to file an affidavit with the Comelec Second Division questioning the spurious signatures on the documents, but it never gave us, some 110 teachers, a chance to be heard."
I can understand the teachers' wrath. The Comelec's decision to uphold Imperial's challenge makes them out to be either incompetent or crooked. Either they are too stupid to allow such humongous wrongdoing to get past them or they are too bright to improve their plight by selling principle. Public school teachers in this country have nothing in life but their good name. To have that taken from them too, they have every right to go to war, or write letters to the editor, whichever delivers them first.
But Jesus Christ, between the public school teachers who counted the votes before the burning gaze of the voters of Legazpi and Benjamin Abalos' cohorts who unearthed the fake ballot boxes amid the shadows of their tomb, beyond the gaze of human eye, whom will you believe? That's a no-brainer.
Seemingly a local issue that affects only local politics, it is in fact a matter of life and death, and one that should transfix our gaze. Two things particularly make it infuriating.
The first is: Why is it so easy for the Comelec (or indeed Congress) to discover machination in vote counts whose honesty the teachers themselves swear to upon their children's lives, while they find it next to impossible to espy any ghost of wrongdoing in vote counts whose rottenness everyone, from priest to general, from God to Gudani, is loudly condemning?
The second is that it makes a mockery of elections. In the same page where Dolot's letter came out last Friday was another letter by a Rudy Coronel that bitterly, and completely rightly, protested the firing of elected officials by the Ombudsman. It was a good reminder that in this country it is not enough to win elections to hold office. You have to snarl and claw as well throughout your term to fend off enemies who mean to grab your office by hook or by crook. Ronaldo Puno's dismissal of officials he does not like is horrendous enough as it is, and I myself cannot understand why we, the public, have not gone to the streets to exorcise that deviltry. That is an ice pick shoved into the heart of democracy. Henceforth, elected local officials may exist only at the sufferance of one of the most insidious and obnoxious characters to crawl out of this planet.
The Rosal-Imperial case pours gasoline into that fire. Henceforth, the ultimate arbiter of who should govern this country is not the Filipino Voter, it is the Alien Comelec. Forget campaigning among your constituents, just remember to campaign among the commissioners. Forget the voters' votes, just remember the commissioners' commissions.
Rosal is removed from office by this act of malice and maliciousness, elections become nothing more than a costly exercise in self-flagellation. The boxes from Legazpi that the Comelec Second Division opened were not just ballot boxes that contained fake ballots, they were a Pandora's box that unleashed an army of evil upon this land.
They get away with this, heaven help us.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=47455
What compelled Dolot and her group to write that letter is that Rosal's legitimacy has been challenged by Imperial and has been upheld by the Comelec's Second Division and then by the Comelec en banc. The case is now pending before the Supreme Court.
What happened was this: After the May 2004 elections, the counting of the votes for mayor was done in full view of the public and duly signed by the teachers. The count produced the results above. No one complained about any irregularity in the counting. No one among the watchers, including the representatives of the candidates, said the teachers called out the wrong names from the ballot forms. The counting was clearly, transparently, unassailably aboveboard.
Now comes the curious part. When the ballot boxes got to the Comelec, Imperial challenged the count, claiming that many of the ballots were fake. When the Comelec Second Division opened the boxes, lo and behold, its members did in fact find a host of fake ballots. How in God's, or Beelzebub's, name those things got in there, only they know. The public school teachers at least are absolutely certain the fake ballots were not there when they turned the ballot boxes over to the Comelec. They know that for a fact because all the ballot boxes bore their signatures certifying them to be authentic. The fake ballot boxes the Comelec "discovered" in their premises did not carry those signatures.
And still comes the curiouser, or more ingeniously devious, part. The fake ballot boxes did not contain votes for Imperial, they contained votes for Rosal! So, putting on the face of stern benignity, the Comelec Second Division and en banc, in sync ruled to blot out the obscenity--the fake ballots--from the face of the earth. And, lo and behold, Rosal ended up with 30,517 votes and Imperial with 32,660 votes. Ergo, by the Comelec's reckoning, Imperial is the rightful mayor of Legazpi City, a matter the commissioners have now laid out before Solomon, also called the Supreme Court, to adjudicate. Ah, but truly, they add whole new meanings to the word "commissioner."
Dolot laments in her letter: "The ballots that were counted by the division were obviously tampered with as they did not bear our real signatures as members of the BEI. This prompted us to file an affidavit with the Comelec Second Division questioning the spurious signatures on the documents, but it never gave us, some 110 teachers, a chance to be heard."
I can understand the teachers' wrath. The Comelec's decision to uphold Imperial's challenge makes them out to be either incompetent or crooked. Either they are too stupid to allow such humongous wrongdoing to get past them or they are too bright to improve their plight by selling principle. Public school teachers in this country have nothing in life but their good name. To have that taken from them too, they have every right to go to war, or write letters to the editor, whichever delivers them first.
But Jesus Christ, between the public school teachers who counted the votes before the burning gaze of the voters of Legazpi and Benjamin Abalos' cohorts who unearthed the fake ballot boxes amid the shadows of their tomb, beyond the gaze of human eye, whom will you believe? That's a no-brainer.
Seemingly a local issue that affects only local politics, it is in fact a matter of life and death, and one that should transfix our gaze. Two things particularly make it infuriating.
The first is: Why is it so easy for the Comelec (or indeed Congress) to discover machination in vote counts whose honesty the teachers themselves swear to upon their children's lives, while they find it next to impossible to espy any ghost of wrongdoing in vote counts whose rottenness everyone, from priest to general, from God to Gudani, is loudly condemning?
The second is that it makes a mockery of elections. In the same page where Dolot's letter came out last Friday was another letter by a Rudy Coronel that bitterly, and completely rightly, protested the firing of elected officials by the Ombudsman. It was a good reminder that in this country it is not enough to win elections to hold office. You have to snarl and claw as well throughout your term to fend off enemies who mean to grab your office by hook or by crook. Ronaldo Puno's dismissal of officials he does not like is horrendous enough as it is, and I myself cannot understand why we, the public, have not gone to the streets to exorcise that deviltry. That is an ice pick shoved into the heart of democracy. Henceforth, elected local officials may exist only at the sufferance of one of the most insidious and obnoxious characters to crawl out of this planet.
The Rosal-Imperial case pours gasoline into that fire. Henceforth, the ultimate arbiter of who should govern this country is not the Filipino Voter, it is the Alien Comelec. Forget campaigning among your constituents, just remember to campaign among the commissioners. Forget the voters' votes, just remember the commissioners' commissions.
Rosal is removed from office by this act of malice and maliciousness, elections become nothing more than a costly exercise in self-flagellation. The boxes from Legazpi that the Comelec Second Division opened were not just ballot boxes that contained fake ballots, they were a Pandora's box that unleashed an army of evil upon this land.
They get away with this, heaven help us.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=47455
posted by dqfan06 @ 9:27 AM
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