By MARK JOSEPH UBALDE
WITH barely 14 days left before the elections, a multisectoral group is making a last-ditch effort to convince the Commission on Elections to adopt a parallel nationwide manual count to avoid a possible “Automated Garci.”
In a press conference held at Club Filipino Sunday, leaders of concerned groups that include the Makati Business Club and Philippine Bar Association read their open letter to the Comelec, saying the decision on their proposal cannot be delayed beyond April 29 or else the parallel manual count won’t be doable.
“If the Comelec decides after April 29, then we are afraid and gravely concerned that the May 10 elections would remain extremely vulnerable to manipulation and fraud,” they said in the letter that will be given to Comelec on Monday when the poll commissioners meet en banc.
Augusto Lagman, an IT specialist and convenor of TransparentElections.Org, said,“It would only take two to four days to ready the system. The Comelec should ensure accuracy than speed of the results.”
Lagman, who is pushing for a manual counting of the votes for president, vice president and mayor, said it would only take an average of three hours to manually count the votes in 600 ballots provided that there is an 80-percent turnout in voters for the precinct.
“We included the mayoralty post since based on our study, people guarding the precincts are more interested in the result of the mayoralty race than the national elections,” he said.
Makati Business Club executive director Alberto Lim said the groups have been telling the Comelec since November to consider manual counting of votes to go hand-in-hand with the automated polls.
“We are not saying that there will be a failure of elections. But there might be a failure of automation,” he said.
Lim said six presidential candidates—Sen. Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III, former president Joseph Estrada, JC de los Reyes, Sen. Jamby Madrigal, Nicanor Perlas, and Eddie Villanueva— have so far expressed support for their call.
MBC chair Ramon del Rosario said businessmen are banking on this year’s elections for genuine reforms in the government. He reported that the business sector is in a “positive mood” about the upcoming elections but only if it is “conducted in a credible way.”
Del Rosario said their groups is willing to put behind some lapses of the Comelec in the conduct of this year’s polls and work for a credible result in the polls.
Lagman added, “If our elections are rigged that will impact on at least 90 million people for the next six years. I don’t know why the Comelec is so cavalier about this?”
The Comelec has yet to regain the trust of the people after a number of their personnel led by no less than a commissioner, Virgilio Garcillano, was an active participant in the tampering of election results in the 2004 elections.
Farmers won’t be used again
Ernesto Ordonez, chair of the Alyansa Agrikultura, a farmer-fisherfolk coalition composed of 42 federations, said they have been pushing for a manual count with the Comelec for the past seven months.
“Why do they say it is only now that we are saying this when we have been telling them to have manual counting from the very beginning?” he said.
The agricultural sector comprises 16 million or 40 percent of the entire electorate.
“We don’t want to be exploited again. We will no longer tolerate this,” said apparently referring to the “fertilizer fund scam,” where former Agriculture Undersecretary Jocelyn “Jocjoc” Bolante used hundred of million of pesos intended for assistance to the farmers for their fertilizer needs for the campaign of Arroyo in the 2004 elections.
Ordonez warned that the farmers and fisherfolk will launch “a massive action” against the Comelec should they go through the elections without the parallel manual count.