[Newspoint] Where our miseries began

Did Ferdinand Marcos Jr. assume the presidency on a fraudulent vote? The Commission on Elections itself, which proclaimed him, is hard put to show, now that it is pressed, that he was elected fair and square. 

Confronted with irregularities in last year’s elections and ordered by the Supreme Court to hand over records the doubters asked for, the Comelec has failed to comply so far. It is facing two central questions: How was it able to count 20 million votes within an hour of the closing of the polls, when preparing for the count alone takes about that long? And why were those votes transmitted from only one private location – one IP address?

With those votes constituting 35% of the total, the stink must have begun to rise in that very first hour. It’s only now, however, that a group that expertly knows its elections and computerized voting has gone to court with a proper case showing that the stink came from the vote and that it had been passed from the hands of the Comelec and Smartmatic, which supplied and operated the voting machines – at a cost of more than a billion pesos to the taxpayers. (READ: Smartmatic bags half of P6-billion poll contracts for 2022)

As for the beneficiaries themselves of election riggings, they seem able, as a rule, to somehow keep their hands off the stink or otherwise wash it well off. And since election protests take too long to resolve, the truly elected end up with hollow victories, because the terms of the positions finally judged rightfully theirs have by then all but expired. (FROM THE ARCHIVES: Election data quash Marcos’ cheating pattern claim)

Stink by itself may prove nothing, but anyone who has paid enough attention to the stink surrounding the present president should have become righteously indignant by now, to the point that they should have been clamoring for a hanging. Such height of emotion, in any case, has not been even vaguely approached, calling thus into question our worthiness of the free vote. 

Or doesn’t that incapacity, having shown itself once too often, prove our unworthiness enough? How could we not have learned from Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo? Indeed, how could we allow her to continue insinuating her mocking presence in our national life?

In 2004 – if we’re simply too shameless to have yet to be reminded – Arroyo was caught on tape in a phone conversation with an election commissioner, implicitly reminding him of an arrangement by which she would win by at least a million votes.

At the time, Arroyo possessed the power of incumbency. She had stepped up from vice president when the impeached Joseph Estrada resigned to escape a verdict of guilty from a Senate acting as an impeachment court (the regular courts would later hand him that verdict, for plunder), and was now running for a regular term. On her end, shortly before the election, she deployed her favorite general Hermogenes Esperon and his troops to replace the military contingent in the southern islands. The cheating turned out to have been centralized there. (Proven so reliable, Esperon has become a sort of man for all political seasons, rising to armed forces chief and, upon his retirement, to chief of staff in Arroyo’s government, then being retained in her successor’s government as chief security adviser, and as chief red-tagger and –baiter in the current regime.)

The self-incriminatory tape, known now by Arroyo’s opening greeting to the election con-missioner, Virgilio Garcillano – “Hello, Garci” – was reproduced widely and played and replayed publicly. Finally stunk out of hiding, Arroyo came on television affecting a Mater Dolorosa look, saying, “I…am…sorry,” and we forgave her. We forgave her not so much because we were taken by her dramatic delivery as because of, I would think, prejudice: We preferred the cheat to the cheated – Fernando Poe Jr., a mere movie actor, like Estrada, although a first-timer in electoral politics, as such yet untainted. From all that, anyway, may well have proceeded the compounding miseries that have followed us to this day.

From a rigged vote, President Arroyo went on to various further riggings. Her government, like Estrada’s, was hallmarked by patronage and corruption, except that hers went on unstopped. It was she who gave us China and helped it establish itself in the business of not only cornering markets and contracts, but grabbing territory and resources. She did it by exerting sway on the latter two of the three presidents following her – Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Jr. For all the socioeconomic repairs and reforms undertaken by her immediate successor, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, his successor and Arroyo ally Duterte managed to undo them.

Apparently, Duterte himself did not need to rig his own vote, but he cheated in other ways. He fraudulently promoted himself as a populist. He allied himself with Arroyo, ceded our strategic and resource-rich western sea to China, and dragged us down the path to authoritarianism. He left us in debt by P13 trillion and provoked the International Criminal Court to chase after him for the killing of thousands of mostly young lives in his ruthless war on drugs.

You can say that Ferdinand Jr. is politically descended from Arroyo and Duterte. He was groomed to succeed Duterte, has taken Duterte’s daughter Sara as his vice president, and kept not a few of Duterte’s and Arroyo’s top lieutenants in his own government. But neither Arroyo nor Duterte can compare with him in pedigree.

Ferdinand Jr. was born to and bred by a notorious original – Duterte was a mere copy, and a poor, obscene one. Ferdinand Sr. declared Martial Law on the pretext of an armed rebellion that had gone out of hand. And with a constitution manufactured for him, he went on to rule as a murdering, plundering dictator for 14 years. It was he in fact who fathered modern election cheating.

Forced by street protests that had built up following the assassination of his archrival Benigno Aquino Jr., Noynoy’s father, two years and a half earlier, he agreed to run in a snap election against Noynoy’s mother, Cory, in February 1986. Two days into the count, vote encoders walked out protesting that their bosses were manipulating the count for Marcos. Within the month, he was out of power, chased into Hawaiian exile by masses of protesters pouring out onto the streets in what has come to be known to the world as the People Power Revolution.

True to a national quick-burn habit, the torch of People Power went out quickly. It was relit somewhat to drive Estrada out. But once the unstopped cheat resumed ruling for six more years, she began to consolidate the dubious investments she had made in the three years left from Estrada’s term. She packed the courts and eased the way for Duterte and Ferdinand Jr., at the same time getting herself elected to Congress by her district in Pampanga and taking her place in the backroom of both regimes as a fellow conspirator. 

Cheating, whether at the polls or elsewhere, had meantime solidified into a culture. But, of course, a nation of suckers helped. – Rappler.com