By YVONNE CHUA
(First published in July 2005)
OFFICIALLY, it’s President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo who, according to Congress’s canvassing, posted a 1.1- million lead over opposition candidate Fernando Poe Jr.
But with the subject of electoral fraud reverberating throughout the wiretapped conversations of then Elections Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano and Arroyo, people are beginning to wonder: Did the president truly win? If she did, was it indeed by more than a million votes? Or could Poe have won? If yes, by how many votes?
Answering these questions is not easy. The 2004 presidential race is the tightest yet since the first Philippine presidential election was held in 1946. Arroyo beat Poe by only 3.5 percentage points. Previously, the closest contest had been between Fidel V. Ramos and Miriam Defensor Santiago, with the former defense secretary leading over the former immigration commissioner by 3.9 points. All presidential elections before 1992 were decided by at least six points.
In the past, people who were skeptical about Congress’s count would look to the exit poll of the Social Weather Stations and the quick count of the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) for validation. For the May 2004 elections, Arroyo has repeatedly invoked the results of SWS survey and the Namfrel tally to insist that she won. In fact, she cited these again in her statement last June 27, in which she apologized for making phone calls to Garcillano.
Indeed, in previous electoral exercises, the results of the two organizations had been fairly close to the official tally. But that was not quite the case in last year’s elections, and the discrepancies are too huge to ignore.
In the congressional canvassing, Arroyo got 40 percent of the votes and Poe 36.5 percent, a difference of 3.5 points. The SWS exit poll, however, showed that 45 percent of the respondents voted Arroyo for president and 34 percent elected Poe, or an 11-point difference.
Mistake from margin of error
While that may look as a clear validation of the Arroyo win, not a few statisticians raised their eyebrows. Dissatisfaction with the exit poll grew when it wrongly stated that Arroyo had defeated Poe in Metro Manila, which historically has voted opposition. This led to an independent review of the exit poll.
The review subsequently concluded that the error stemmed from the high number of non-responses and the understated margin of error used in the survey.
A margin of error estimates the extent to which a survey’s reported percentages would vary if the same poll were taken multiple times. A +/- 2 margin of error, for example, means that a 90 percent finding can range from 88 to 92 percent.
Former National Statistics Office chairman Tomas Africa said that if a +/- 2.8 margin of error instead of a +/-1.4 that the SWS used had been applied to the exit poll, the presidential election could be described as “too close to call, a near statistical dead heat, and not a clear victory for Arroyo.”
“The conjecture that Poe may have won in the voting but lost in the elections cannot be entirely dismissed,” he added.
SWS president Mahar Mangahas said the margin of error used in the exit poll is the industry standard. He acknowledged, however, the mistake the SWS made in the National Capital Region, where both the Namfrel and the official tally showed Poe winning. Mangahas, who is a cousin of Poe, said the research organization had failed to get a good sample and many respondents were not speaking up. “We had not gotten anywhere close to our target, 1,000,” he said. “We got 500 to 600. There were heavy rains. (The fieldwork) was stopped. People were pulled out.”
But Mangahas stressed that the SWS results for the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao were consistent with the Namfrel tally (see “>>”). Both were the exact opposite of the official tally, which showed Arroyo winning in the region. “This is where Namfrel and Comelec should slug it out,” Mangahas said.
On the surface, the Namfrel overall count seemed to reflect the official tally—39 percent of the votes went to Arroyo and 37 percent to Poe—but sharp deviations detected in the provincial and regional breakdowns have made some sectors wonder if Namfrel managed to capture the real score in last year’s polls.
Unfortunately, Namfrel’s terminal report on the 2004 elections makes no reference to discrepancies in the presidential and vice presidential elections. It cites only discrepancies in the count for administration candidates Rodolfo Biazon and Robert Barbers, who were fighting over the 12th and last senatorial slot.
Less than one million?
Roberto Verzola, a computer expert who volunteered for the election NGO Coalition for Hope in the 2004 elections, found discrepancies in the Namfrel and congressional figures not only for the ARMM, but also for Central Mindanao, Northern Mindanao, Western Mindanao, Central Luzon, and the Cordillera Administrative Region.
He also came across discrepancies in the voter turnout reported by Namfrel and the Commission on Elections in the ARMM, Ilocos, Central Visayas, Central Mindanao, Eastern Visayas, Bicol, Cagayan Valley, and Central Luzon. (It also hasn’t escaped some election observers that the Comelec had 43.5 million registered voters in the list for 2004, versus 37.8 million in its list for the 2002 barangay elections, or a 15.2 percent increase over only two years. Even some Comelec officials say this is statistically improbable, explaining the increase should parallel population growth, or be slightly lower because not everybody registers.)
This made Verzola conclude: “It is clear from the Namfrel tally that GMA could not have won by 1.1 million votes.”
At the time Namfrel’s quick count closed on June 5, 2004, Arroyo was ahead by 680,922 votes. Verzola said, however, there were still 4.4 million uncounted votes mainly from Poe’s bailiwicks and about one million from Arroyo’s. If and when counted, these would further reduce Arroyo’s lead, he said. Namfrel collected 90 percent of the election returns and tabulated 83 percent of these.
Extrapolating from the congressional and Namfrel counts, Verzola said that either Arroyo or Poe could have won by up to around 120,000-plus votes. The only way to find out which way the voting really went, he said, is if Namfrel releases the breakdown of precincts per province they tallied.
Former Comelec Chairman Christian Monsod likewise believes that Arroyo did not win by more than a million votes. “There (were) just too many reports of cheating to be ignored, mainly in Mindanao, with Comelec high officials probably interfering with the process,” he said. “This may have been driven by what the administration thought was necessary for a so-called ‘clear mandate.’” He noted that the opposition lacked the machinery to protect its votes.
“Corruption at the highest levels of the Comelec and partisanship for a sitting president were the other issues,” Monsod added. “The prolonged and badly managed canvassing in Congress did much to also hurt the credibility of the process. And Namfrel, perhaps for the first time in its existence, perceived as not being totally transparent and decisive, lost some ground in credibility as well.”
Based on the former Comelec chairman’s own calculations, Arroyo’s margin of victory was probably close to one percent, or about 300,000 votes.
Longest canvassing in history
The canvassing of the presidential and vice presidential elections was the longest ever in the country’s history: The country waited for 40 days before Congress finally proclaimed a winner on June 20, 2004.
The political think tank Institute for Popular Democracy described the canvassing as “credible” and “legitimate” insofar as legal and procedural terms: The ballot boxes were opened, the certificates of canvass were examined and the opposition’s entering of its complaints were noted by the chair of the Joint Canvass Committee and the majority members of the of the committee.
But, it said, the rules and technicalities of the canvassing outweighed the principles of fairness and decency. “The fundamental question remains to be whether the electorate’s will was reflected in the counting and canvassing. The canvassing was credible according to the implementation of the rules prescribed but it did not provide a categorical answer to the question,” according to IPD.
This was exactly the opposition legislators’ beef about the majority’s decision to simply note and quickly set aside their objections to scores of municipal and provincial COCs and their accompanying statements of votes during the canvassing.
Citing discrepancies, alterations and erasures, the minority had objected to COCs from 41 provinces and cities. It requested going back to the precinct-level election returns, but was spurned. The minority alleged massive cheating in Cebu, Bulacan, Pangasinan, Bohol, Iloilo and the Mindanao provinces.
Based on figures on the election returns it had retrieved, the opposition contended that Arroyo’s votes were padded and Poe’s correspondingly shaved by 159,752 in Cebu province and 23,421 in Cebu City alone. The official tally counted 965,630 for Arroyo and 123,099 for Poe in the province, and 220,060 and 58,591 for the two respective candidates in the city.
And had the election returns in all the areas in question been tabulated, Poe would have posted a 511,981 lead over Arroyo, according to the opposition. “Candidate Poe and (Loren) Legarda are the real winners in the May 10, 2004 elections,” the minority declared in its report.
Until the election returns are opened and counted, the opposition’s guess is as good as anyone’s – and will remain one.
(VERA Files trustee Yvonne Chua wrote this report for I Report of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. She was then the center’s training director.)