When the newly elected senators assume office on June 30, there will be six women senators—Grace Poe, Loren Legarda, Nancy Binay and Cynthia Villar, plus the two holdovers, Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Pia Cayetano. At least three new opposition senators—Binay, JV Ejercito and Gringo Honasan—will be added to the opposition ranks in the Senate.
The Commission on Elections decided to suspend the canvassing of party-list votes late afternoon of May 14, purportedly because of “issues” arising from the inclusion of disqualified party-list groups in the ballot.
With due respect to the Commission on Elections, I find no legal and factual basis for the proclamation in installment of six senatorial candidates (Grace Poe, Loren Legarda, Alan Peter Cayetano, Chiz Escudero, Nancy Binay and Sonny Angara) on May 16, and another three (Bam Aquino, Koko Pimentel and Sonny Trillanes) on the next day, May 17.
The Commission on Elections’ odd decision to leave the candidates and the whole nation hanging in suspense with its sudden adjournment as a canvassing body on the night of Election Day “to take a much-needed rest” was a public relations blunder. It again opened the electoral process, particularly the counting, to doubt and speculation.
Despite scathing criticisms damning the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) system, the automated elections will be held tomorrow (Monday) as scheduled. Let us all go out and vote.
“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war—or before an election.” Otto von Bismarck’s adage unreels with a vengeance in the homestretch of the May 13 elections.
Maybe this is what happens when lawyers are appointed to the Commission on Elections not as lawyers but as laymen. The Comelec begins to lose sight of the limits set by law.
It was a humid October afternoon when my sister and I went to register at the Commission on Elections. That was the week before the last day of voter registration. The queue was not as lengthy as we expected, but there were already about 300 people there. The size of the crowd grew quickly as [...]
It is quite alarming that Commission on Elections Chair Sixto Brillantes is so confident about the credibility of the coming 2013 elections even though he himself has disallowed the review of the source code. How can he put so much trust in a system he himself does not understand?
Considering that there is no way for ordinary people to find out whether the results of the precinct count optical scan machines would match the data that will be received by the canvassing servers, hiding the source code will just strengthen our doubts as to the reliability of the election results.
We were amused when the Commission on Elections chair and the interior secretary held a press conference discussing the capability of some electronic gadgets to jam the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) transmittal of the results of the 2013 elections. Giving the public an idea of the various possibilities in which the elections could be sabotaged does not only raise doubts about the credibility of elections; it also gives unscrupulous “merchants” an idea about how they can possibly widen their market, especially at the local level where the failure to transmit the election results from a single precinct could open up the opportunity to tamper with the results (during the manual transmission of the election returns).
Immediately after the May 2010 automated elections, protests were made by an accredited group of election observers composed of overseas Filipino professionals.
“Ayoko na.” Thus did Commission on Elections Chair Sixto Brillantes rather dramatically throw up his hands in the quest for the all-important source code of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines that will be used in the May elections. “I’m no longer interested because it’s too late already,” he said. “Election Day is so close, and even if they give us the source code now, it can no longer be reviewed for lack of time.”
