‘Hello Garci’ redux

It should not be a surprise that the “Hello Garci” election fraud controversy has again cropped up in a Senate investigation. The controversy involving tapped phone conversations between “Ma’am” and “Garci” is one among many unfinished businesses that clouded Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s administration, but was particularly scandalous, and sufficiently rocked the boat, as to force her to deliver an apology on national TV in June 2005. The then president appeared on cam with sad, made-up eyes and dressed in blue (a calming color, according to psychologists and image gurus, and one that she would wear in public for the next tumultuous months). Of course, the apology itself did not say much, conceding as it did only to a lapse in judgment (calling an election officer during the 2004 election period in a purported effort to protect her votes) and not to an attempt to tamper with election results (as the voices in the tapes clearly indicated).

The House of Representatives’ inquiry into the matter in 2005 was conducted and ended without a coherent result, thanks largely to an executive order issued by Arroyo barring officials from testifying at such congressional proceedings without her say-so. (What was that said about the heady nature of power and what it does?)

The controversy having been left unresolved, it was easy for “Hello Garci” to turn up time and again like a bad penny and then to disappear in the interstices of state corridors. It was only a matter of a change in circumstances—and in administrations—for it to once more make an appearance, like a corpse needing a proper burial, in a formal inquiry. Hopefully, the Senate will make progress where the House could not, and the appropriate government agencies will get the process moving toward resolution and thence to the logical conclusion.

Why is the resolution of the “Hello Garci” controversy so crucial to the nation’s political health? On it rests the question of whether Arroyo’s victory in the 2004 presidential election is legitimate or a sham (a question that has long dogged not only the woman herself but the entire body politic), and whether the supposed deeply entrenched network that makes possible the commission of election fraud and the subversion of the people’s will is just long-held suspicion or glaring reality. To be sure, even if Arroyo’s electoral victory is found a sham, it will not lead to a nullification of her proclamation as president. (Recall the ceremony: Arroyo proclaimed in the dead of night—3:35 a.m., truly a witching hour—on June 24, 2004, by Congress acting as the National Board of Canvassers, despite and after days of much questioning in the canvass.) But it will make things right, settle scores, even mark our progress as a nation.

The resolution of “Hello Garci” will break the climate of impunity that breeds many insidious fraud practices, including “dagdag-bawas,” the padding and shaving of votes that operators have mastered to a degree so sophisticated that powerful people think nothing of ordering warlords and their minions to produce clean sweeps and zero votes in their bailiwicks. Most of all, it will prove this administration’s political will to clean up the Augean stables of poll fraud.

It will certainly be no cake walk, and it’s clear that we’re in for a long haul. The findings of the joint panel of the Department of Justice and Commission on Elections that recommended the filing of an electoral sabotage case against Arroyo mainly concerned the 2007 senatorial elections in parts of Mindanao. It remains to be seen if the coming trial, or succeeding investigations, will lead to findings specific to “Hello Garci” and the convoluted tale of the tapes. (Time is of the essence. At least one man involved in this sordid saga has died: Samuel Ong, a deputy director of the National Bureau of Investigation, who claimed to hold “the mother of all tapes” to implicate Arroyo.)

Who will light the way through the labyrinthine processes of poll fraud as it applies to the 2004 presidential election? It takes a thief, as even such as one as Garci will conceivably agree.