Infection in poll system

Joseph Estrada has a piece of advice for Sen. Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III, who has refused to run with Juan Miguel Zubiri in the former president’s United Nationalist Alliance senatorial ticket in 2013: “Give and forgive in order to be happy.”

Never mind that forgiveness presupposes contrition on the wrongdoer’s part. Pimentel is loath to share the stage with Zubiri because he was the principal victim of “dagdag-bawas” (vote-padding and -shaving) in Central Mindanao in the 2007 elections that gave Zubiri a seat in the Senate. Zubiri vacated that seat in favor of Pimentel last year, only after former Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao Gov. Zaldy Ampatuan, followed by former Maguindanao election supervisor Lintang Bedol, corroborated the claim that the 2007 polls were rigged allegedly on orders of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her husband to favor the administration’s ticket, under which Zubiri ran.

But while Zubiri did give up his Senate seat, he never admitted wrongdoing. “I quit but I am no cheat,” he said, and even then declared that he would run again in the 2013 senatorial race “to seek a fresh mandate.” He was resigning from his position “with honor and dignity … without admitting any fault and with my vehement denial of the alleged electoral fraud hurled against me.” In his mind, quitting without apologizing made him a rare profile in courage—or, in the odd formulation of his wife, “Pinatunayan niyang isa siyang tunay na lalaki (He proved himself to be a real man)”—and therefore deserving of continued political viability.

With Zubiri having disclaimed any responsibility for the injury he had caused Pimentel—and, by extension, the electoral process—what, then, is he to be forgiven for? Yet to Estrada, such moral nuances are all a pissing contest. As he sees it, Pimentel’s stand arises less from a genuinely principled opposition to election fraud as from pique and wounded pride—nothing that his, Estrada’s, legendary skill for political bonhomie couldn’t paper over. Thus, for Pimentel to keep to his stand against the dishonesty Zubiri represents and apparently benefited from is, in Estrada’s view, a petulant display of arrogance: “Nauuna yabang, eh. Akala nila sila lang ang righteous.”

There, in a nutshell, is why the public should look askance at this mutant political alliance Estrada’s Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino has forged with Vice President Jejomar Binay’s PDP-Laban. It is obvious that UNA has no space for virtues such as integrity, propriety or delicadeza in its platform. What it welcomes is political expediency—the kind of ethically unhindered accommodation that demands, if need be, the emasculation of the very heart of what a candidate believes to be right and worth fighting for.

Pimentel under UNA, as Inquirer columnist Randy David had pointed out, “will make it difficult for him to explain why he is running with people who represent the very antithesis of what he stands for.” But for Estrada, it only boils down to “yabang.”

There, too, lies the rank infection in the electoral system apart from the systemic and widespread cheating that happens every poll date. Zubiri can insist on a veneer of innocence only because the Senate Electoral Tribunal has not ruled with finality on who actually won between him and Pimentel. Zubiri’s resignation rendered the protracted recount moot, but left the ultimate question of accountability hanging—again. Pursuing redress against election fraud is a staggeringly slow, expensive, and extremely time-consuming process in this country, and long has the body politic suffered for it.

Note that Pimentel’s father himself, who coined the term “dagdag-bawas” in 1995 in protest against the “colossal cheating” that, he said, deprived him of a Senate seat in favor of now Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, also never had the satisfaction of a final ruling on his petition. The SET dismissed the elder Pimentel’s suit, but only on the ground that his victory in the 1998 senatorial elections had nullified his protest.

There’s also Roxas vs. Binay, still ongoing more than two years after the last elections, along with God knows how many other disputes on the local level. Clearly, the electoral system needs overhaul, and that should include the means by which competing claims are adjudicated—ideally in a fair, fast, transparent manner. Otherwise, disgraced politicians will keep resurrecting themselves on the ballot, in the teeth of repeated betrayals of it.