Public school teachers, whom the Commission on Elections always deputizes to administer the polls at the precinct level, are the big winners of the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) automated system. No longer required to tally manually the election results, they were spared from harrowing physical work, nighttime terror threats and tedious legal hassles.
No one thought she had a ghost of a chance. All surveys prior to the just recently concluded elections nowhere showed senatorial candidate Grace Poe Llamanzares shining through—until she decided to drop the name Llamanzares and put the stress on Poe (her late father’s surname, cinema’s “action king,” Fernando Poe Jr. or FPJ). “Grace Poe, [...]
When Filipino students in late-19th-century Spain grew homesick and pined for their loved ones or even the heartwarming taste of adobo or sinigang, they learned to love the land of their birth more.
From the moment we first beheld the unique magic of people power in 1986, we have scanned the political horizon for signs of its recurrence. The possibility that it will appear again gives us eternal hope. Its unpredictability, however, keeps us guessing when and in what form it will happen again. Its elusiveness tells us that while it can catalyze reform, it doesn’t linger long enough to form the basis for enduring change.
So he finally admitted it. The number of precinct count optical scan machines that had experienced transmission problems, said Commission on Elections Chair Sixto Brillantes Jr. last Thursday, wasn’t in the hundreds but in the thousands—18,000, or 24-25 percent of the around 78,000 machines deployed in the midterm elections.
Commission on Elections Chair Sixto Brillantes has the right of it when he says that the 60-30-10 pattern of voting that was observed by concerned netizens in data posted by the Comelec’s transparency server for the senatorial race was not indicative of fraud. But then he spoils it all when he explains his reasoning.
Much of the gratification in doing election surveys comes from the voters’ overwhelming appreciation of them.
May I react to Daniel Aloc’s letter “Genuine nationalists still can’t escape Red-tagging” (Inquirer, 5/2/13). It appears that because of Teddy Casiño’s campaign ad (“Karaniwang Tao”), the party-list Bayan Muna representative who ran for a Senate seat in the recent elections got Aloc’s vote.
The biggest winner in the 2013 elections is Grace Poe, because nobody saw it coming. The biggest loser is Sixto Brillantes, but then, he had it coming.
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.
I really like what Sen. Serge Osmeña said about the recently concluded senatorial elections, “P-Noy won but Binay did not lose.”
We do not have to look far to find sources of hope, inspiring stories of unexpected or eagerly anticipated election victories, from the May 13 vote. But the setbacks are real, too, and threaten to undo or undermine many of these same victories.
