Hail Dick Gordon for SC vote on ‘PCOS receipts’

Dick Gordon and I have already buried our differences. But I now go beyond that. I am grateful to Dick Gordon for what he did: compelling the Commission on Elections to issue voter verification receipts—which means, one less chance for automated election cheating!

But let us continue to be vigilant. To those who still deny that “hocus PCOS” is possible—and they include Comelec Chair Andy Bautista—we ask: Please look at the pictures of wrapped ballots found inside ballot boxes; among them were wrapped ballots in 78 of 80 precincts opened in Dinalupihan, Bataan. They were obviously compromised ballots! How did they get wrapped?

The genuine ballots had been taken out and replaced with tampered ballots in an attempt to have the manual count match the PCOS count. But the perpetrators failed: they tried to match only the figures for the mayoralty candidates; in the rest of the positions, from congressman down to councilors, they failed by as much as 30 to 40 percent! We wonder how big the discrepancies were with the genuine ballots!

To those still in denial—and they include Bautista—who say that the culprit was human intervention and not faulty machines. Hello?

Isn’t it clear that the purpose of those who tampered with the ballots was to make sure that the manual count would match the PCOS count? Would they do that elaborate cover-up if the PCOS count were accurate?

—FELICITO C. PAYUMO, former congressman, first district, Bataan