JEDDAH, 18 May 2007 — ALTHOUGH the counting of votes from Monday’s election is not yet over, it seems clear from the quick count of the National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) that the opposition is going to make a nearly clear sweep of the 12 Senate seats up for grabs, leaving only two for administration candidates and one for an independent.
As I write this, the Genuine Opposition’s Loren Legarda, Francis Escudero and Panfilo Lacson are leading the count. The rebel navy officer Lt. Antonio Trillanes IV is in 12th place. Only two candidates from the administration’s Team Unity are in the top 12, namely Edgardo Angara at 7th place and Joker Arroyo at 8th place. One must also note that although these two are from the ruling party, they have also been critics of efforts by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her supporters to amend the Philippine Constitution to allow her to stay in power beyond her term’s expiration in 2010 under a parliamentary system.
But all of these is not surprising. What is surprising and is frankly a joke are the election results in Maguindanao province, which show a clean sweep for all TU candidates for the Senate. Not only is this statistically most unlikely, it is also surely the result of massive corruption of the vote in Muslim Mindanao. Foreign observers said on Wednesday in Manila that the elections in Mindanao were worse than in Afghanistan, something the Philippines should be deeply ashamed of. Large-scale intimidation of voters through the presence of armed operatives of various candidates standing in voting precincts were widely reported, along with the open exchange of money for votes and truckloads of flying voters being taken around to vote multiple times!
Along with those violations of the election code, the observers from the Asian Network for Free Elections also reported a near total lack of secrecy in voting precincts, meaning that most voters were not allowed to keep their choices secret which obviously forced many to vote a certain way out of fear of reprisals.
On Tuesday, the administration was saying that the public should wait and see the tabulation of votes from the Visayas and Mindanao, supposed bailiwicks of the Arroyo administration, before declaring an opposition victory in the Senate. But much of the vote from Mindanao, especially the Muslim areas, seems to have been totally corrupted and frankly should not be admissible in the canvassing of votes.
There seems to be a total lack of respect for the sanctity of the ballot in those areas, what with the various explosions and intimidation of voters by armed thugs, and thus the Commission on Elections should undertake an urgent election education program that would have to begin in elementary schools and continue up to the provincial level in order to restore some semblance of belief in democracy.
Many Filipinos from Mindanao are so disheartened and disgusted with the total corruption of the electoral process there that they now flat-out refuse to participate in the electoral process. This is a shame and something needs to be done urgently to clean up the electoral process and culture in that area so that citizens can regain the confidence that their votes will actually count for something.
While administration candidates like Chavit Singson are leading the vote in Mindanao, even though he’s a distant 23rd in the Namfrel count, in the Visayas the picture is different. There GO candidates are dominating the senatorial contest.
In Saudi Arabia, Filipinos who bothered to vote overwhelmingly chose GO candidates, with Escudero leading the returns, followed by the independent Francis Pangilinan, GO’s Noynoy Aquino, Loren Legarda (GO), Manny Villar (GO), Panfilo Lacson (GO), Joker Arroyo (TU), Ralph Recto (TU), Alan Peter Cayetano (GO), Sonia Roco (GO), Trillanes (GO), and Mike Defensor (TU).
Although voter turnout was dismally low in the Kingdom, with only about 14 percent of registered voters casting their votes — worldwide, only 78,360 out of 504,110 registered voters cast their votes — the Department of Foreign Affairs is insisting that the overseas absentee voting (OAV) exercise was a success. The vice chair of the OAV Secretariat, Ambassador Generoso Calonge, said that the fact that over half a million Filipinos worldwide had registered was a success. I think that is a very narrow view of the electoral process, as I’m sure most people would agree that actual voter participation in an election is what is important, not just to get them registered.
The fact that this was not a presidential election, and the fact that many OFWs move around a lot because of changing jobs, are being cited as justifications for the low turnout. I myself wrote about this a few weeks ago, but I still think that Comelec had a responsibility to run a public awareness campaign overseas to get OFWs registered or update their voter information if they had moved, in order to allow more OFWs the possibility to vote. I know some Filipinos who could not vote because they had moved to a different city after the 2004 election and had not re-registered at their new location.
Obviously the Philippine government cannot force OFWs to register, let alone vote; that is up to the individual. But a public service campaign of ads in newspapers and on television would have gone a long way to encourage more OFWs to register and possibly vote.
Election monitors will now have to be extra-vigilant in the canvassing of the votes in the following weeks, as this is where most of the heavyweight cheating is going to take place. I hope the threat of popular protest and the fact that the media and the public are more aware than ever of the methods of cheating, will keep any such shenanigans to a minimum. The Philippines deserves clean elections, not only to restore confidence of the people in the electoral process, but to bring long-needed stability and prosperity that so many have longed for.
Comments or questions? E-mail me at: [email protected]. Visit my blog at: http://rasheedsworld.blogspot.com.
