Resign All!!!

E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

Resign All!!!
Sunday, 06 10, 2007

"All the commissioners resigned from their posts, clearing the way for reform of the commission. The President accepted their resignations. The resignations had been demanded by the main opposition party, as the commissioners made themselves controversial at the time of updating the country’s voters’ list, which now has about 12 million fake voters. All the commissioners occupy constitutional posts. Even the President has no authority to sack them unless they willingly resign.”

This news item is true. But before you grab your cellphone to broadcast it to your friends so that they can pass it on to their friends and so on until it goes viral and sends the country’s cellphone servers crashing, let me calm your wildly beating, exultant heart with the cruel information that the aforesaid commissioners are not our own honorable election commissioners. Repeat: They are not Filipinos. And the news item comes from a Xinhua news agency release in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

In the face of controversy and scandal, other people in the government can be decent and do what is expected of them. In Bangladesh, they resign; in Japan, they even commit suicide. Unfortunately in our country, we find no parallel to these acts of contrition.

We will never be treated to the spectacle of a commissioner jumping into the Pasig to expiate for his dishonorable conduct. We will never witness the day when a commissioner resigns because it is the honorable thing to do; he will merely take a leave of absence and come back virtually begging to be reinstalled to an assignment he was supposed to have resigned from for reasons of health. Nor will we see the day when a commissioner, confronted with incontrovertible video evidence, admit that he has told a brazen lie; he will only tell the public that he was misinformed and whatever he did was only prompted by his desire to “safeguard the vote.”

Despite widespread denunciation of their handling of the 2004 elections, and now the 2007 elections, our honorable commissioners at Comelec still cling to their posts like predatory and parasitic leeches, invoking their security of tenure under the Constitution and gloating over the legalism that they could be removed only through impeachment.

Twenty seven days after the elections last May, the Comelec has yet to finish the canvassing in many areas of the country. It may not be too late for Abalos and his group of black-robed commissioners to heed the white, numinous light of their conscience, and henceforth act as decent, honorable men. But judging from their many recent decisions as a commission bearing on the 2007 elections, that would be too much to expect from mortals such as they are. They are toughing it out, they will stay on, to preside over the next anomaly-ridden elections.

The opposition had posted the warning that the election cheating machinery for the administration candidates was already in place as early as two years ago.

Those who figured prominently in the “Hello Garci” conversations were, not surprisingly, posted to areas where they can reprise their skills at juggling figures, faking signatures and switching ballots.

Automation of the polls, despite the law requiring its implementation, was ignored on the convenient excuse that it was too late in the day to put nationwide computerization in commission.

So back to the old manual system, where the Voters’ Book was rigged, multiplying the number of voters to unimaginable proportions, allowing an individual rooted in one place to vote in several precincts all at once, and the dead to rise from their graves in order to exercise their right of suffrage.

Maguindanao (again, that province) and the entire ARMM was abandoned to the poll operators who ran roughshod all over the place, making a mockery of the electoral process and frustrating the will of the electorate.

The military was allowed to do its own untrammelled operations to disenfranchise on a wholesale magnitude voters in the bailiwicks of progressive-party lists.

The long count in fraud-prone areas festered, to squeeze in one or two more favored candidates for senator.

A party-list based in Mandaluyong won overwhelmingly in Basilan.

Canvassing in Laguna could not proceed on account of an order issued to favor a relative.

A commissioner mysteriously got sick, leaving the canvassing of returns in an all-too important province at the mercy of those buying votes at P5,000 each.

And so it goes.

All these betray the lack of good intentions — a callousness, even — on the part of Abalos, et al. to heed the people’s plea for honest, orderly and peaceful elections.

Only the vigilance of those who can rightly demand decency has prevented the Comelec from garnering for its favored candidates the desired and pre-determined results. True, there were small victories for the decent, but overall, Abalos, et al. held sway.

Can there ever be honest, orderly and peaceful elections under the tenure of the Hon. Benjamin Abalos Sr. and his black-robed commissioners?

That question was once posed by this paper. Answering its own question, the Tribune said it will be very difficult to conduct such elections, given the infective agents of lying, cheating and stealing that were in place in 2004 and have gone viral in the following years until they devoured all traces of honor and decency in the hearts of otherwise honorable and decent men. These viruses were hatched at the Comelec, and as long that constitutional body continues to function merely as a host-laboratory of liars and cheats who continue to replicate themselves, no elections can be honest, orderly and peaceful, much less credible.

We are stuck with Abalos, et al. Can we ever hope that they, like Saul on the way to Damascus, or Justice Antonio Carpio in his ponencia upholding the raison d’etre of the Supreme Court, will see the light and let decency prevail in their hearts?

Absent these miracles, all of them should now resign.

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