A silver lining

Everything old is new again.” Certainly, the faces and names look awfully familiar. Taking the mantle of speakership in a most dramatic, almost histrionic manner is Rep. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo—congresswoman from Pampanga, former undersecretary (trade and industry), former secretary (social welfare and development), former senator, former vice president, and, of course, former president.

One wonders, reading through the list of positions she’s held, if there is no one else among our population of 106 million or so Filipinos who could carry out her duties. Or who could match her ambition and cunning.

One wonders, too, why we have not sated our hunger for “old” political names. Witness how closely former senator Bongbong Marcos came to be “a heartbeat away” from the presidency. Were it not for a slim margin in favor of Leni Robredo, we would all be biting our nails with every bit of news about President Duterte’s health or ill-health, every cold, sniffle or mystery midnight visit to a hospital.

Even so, those who still remember the dark days of martial law, as well as the blunders of the younger Marcos (remember how he sabotaged the passage of the first Bangsamoro Basic Law?), are still on tenterhooks. Marcos’ poll protest against Robredo is still very much in play, and he seems unnaturally confident that the Presidential Electoral Tribunal will see things his way.

There is an image from the tumultuous moments before the Sona that sends shivers down our spines. It shows GMA shouting from up high on the podium shortly after her “election” as Speaker, while down below, a “terno-ed” Imee Marcos, wearing the same color garment as GMA, poses for posterity, holding up a two-fingered “V” symbol. Whose victory were they celebrating?

Here’s a silver lining in this gathering gray cloud.

Just this week, the Commission on Elections told the PET that the automated votecounting system for the 2016 elections had been calibrated to read as valid votes marks that cover at least 25 percent of the oval for each candidate. This is significant, because the PET, composed of Supreme Court justices, had previously increased the minimum requirement for oval shading from 25 percent to 50 percent.

The Robredo camp had argued that if the 50-percent threshold was upheld, it would disenfranchise a disproportionate portion of votes for the current vice president.

The Vice President’s camp said it is “highly confident” that the Comelec’s position would finally resolve the threshold issue, which it said was “clearly a very simple issue but made very complicated and confusing just because of the personal and political interests of such parties who are out to win the protest by all means.”

And, contrary to the Marcos camp’s claims that rules had been changed in the middle of the game, the Comelec asserted that the 25-percent threshold “was implemented from the very beginning of the 2016” elections.

Robredo’s partisans hold that “this very recent development is not only historical in the highly specialized field of election law, but more importantly it was a vindication of our voters’ constitutional right to suffrage which was placed in danger by some procedural technicalities raised by Marcos in the course of the revision and recount of the ballots at the PET.” However, they regretted that such a “technical” issue led to “undue and considerable delay in the ongoing revision and recount of the ballots,” which damaged and prejudiced the electoral system.

We should all be aware, though, that this is just an affirmation of the Comelec’s earlier rulings, which the PET had inexplicably ignored in earlier discussions. It is still up to the PET if it will give serious consideration to the Comelec’s opinion or insist on its 50-percent threshold.

As far as I can tell, the Marcos camp holds that the poll body’s comment is biased in favor of Robredo, basing this comment on the presence of Robredo’s representative in a picnic among the Comelec personnel responsible for the recount. Will our “Supremes” lend credence to such a shallow allegation?

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