With all of the latest public opinion polls showing that Philippine voters will overwhelmingly elect opposition candidates to the Senate, we must all be vigilant and make sure that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her allies do not cheat in this election.

Already Team Unity candidates have been attacking the Social Weather Stations polling outfit for predicting that Genuine Opposition candidates will sweep the upcoming May elections. TU media manager and Eastern Samar Gov. Ben Evardone said that SWS would be out of business after being proven wrong after the elections.

But even the other independent polling organization, Pulse Asia, is predicting a sweep for GO candidates in the Senate. Could two large and reputable polling outfits be so wrong in the same way? It seems highly unlikely. Pulse Asia latest trust ratings of politicians, undertaken nationwide from April 3-5, 2007, and sampling 1,800 registered voters, found that opposition candidates had the highest trust ratings, while President Arroyo and her allies were highly distrusted.

The survey, which has a margin of error of +/- 2.3 percentage points, found that former Sen. Loren Legarda had the highest trust rating at 63 percent, with Minority Floor Leader Francis Escudero getting 53 percent; Senate President Manuel Villar getting 55 percent; Sen. Panfilo Lacson, 45 percent, and Pateros-Taguig Rep. Alan Peter Cayetano with a 47 percent trust rating.

On the other end of the scale, President Arroyo, former President Fidel Ramos and former Sen. Tessie Aquino-Oreta, all scored between 41 percent and 43 percent on the distrust scale. More worryingly, Commission on Elections Chairman Benjamin Abalos is viewed very ambivalently by Filipino voters with 39 percent of them unsure about Abalos, and 40 percent of them distrusting him.

The announcement on Wednesday that the Comelec had stricken off 1.1 million names from the voters list, comprising the names of dead voters, double registrants and fictitious voters, should help restore a little of the confidence that the electoral body has lost heavily over the past several years. But, the continuing refusal of the Comelec to release the names of the candidates of the party-list nominees, threatens to further erode confidence in the poll body, and only fuels speculation that the Arroyo administration is trying to manipulate the outcome of that part of the election.

The traditional party-list groups, such as Akbayan and Bayan Muna, have also recently complained that the Arroyo administration was behind the sudden appearance of a dozen new party-list groups, in an attempt to confuse voters and take away from the votes that Bayan Muna and others usually get.

Since Akbayan and Anak Pawis have traditionally been leftist in ideology, it is argued that the current anti-leftist tilt of the Arroyo government has pushed it to establish all of these so-called “front” party-list groups to take away from leftist power in Congress. Of course, the Arroyo administration has vehemently denied this, but it does seem like this is the strategy that they are adopting.

And the Arroyo administration should be scared of the strength of leftist party-list groups.

According to a March 2007 survey of voters by Pulse Asia, 49 percent of voters had an awareness of party-list system, and if the elections were held today, 57 percent of the voters would elect a party-list group to the House of Representatives. All of the top three party-list groups that would win three seats in Congress were leftist: Bayan Muna, with 11.9 percent of the votes; Gabriela Women’s Party, with 6.4 percent of the vote; Akbayan! Citizen’s Action Part, with 7 percent of the vote, and Anak Pawis, with 8 percent.

Even OFWs in Hong Kong voted overwhelmingly last Sunday for opposition candidates in a mock poll in which nearly 700 registered voters participated in. The GO bagged 10 of the 12 slots in that election, with Legarda coming in first with 594 votes, followed by Villar with 504 votes and Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III with 463 votes.

All Filipinos, and OFWs, will have to be extra vigilant during this election. The Arroyo administration is already seeing that voters at home and abroad are overwhelmingly favoring opposition candidates. Voters cannot afford to have an election tampered with yet again just because a certain group of politicians think they have a God-given right to rule the country because the “silly” voters don’t know better.