What fraud?

Electoral fraud is electoral fraud, whether it is committed in the name of the ruling party or a candidate with unlimited funds or a well-oiled machinery. History’s lesson is clear: The one unforgivable political crime is massive cheating at the polls.

It was not the allegations of massive corruption that finally drove the Marcoses out of Malacañang, but evidence of systematic cheating during the snap election of Feb. 7, 1986. (When Juan Ponce Enrile, then the defense minister, broke away from the Marcos regime, he admitted in public that he had manufactured hundreds of thousands of votes for Ferdinand Marcos in Cagayan Valley; it was a strategic confession, meant to provoke both anger against Marcos and sympathy for the rebels, from the people who were coming to Enrile’s aid.)

It was not the allegations of corruption linked to Gloria Arroyo’s husband that precipitated her crisis of legitimacy and made her the most unpopular president since surveys became a regular feature of Philippine politics, but the unrefuted evidence of a conspiracy to commit electoral fraud. The object of that infamous phone call between her and election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano was to pad her vote total in the 2004 elections with a million votes.

Even in the case of President Joseph Estrada, it was not the allegations of corruption that forced him onto that lonely barge that ferried him out of Malacañang in 2001; it was the brazen 11-10 vote in the Senate, convened as an impeachment court, which prevented the opening of the second Jose Velarde envelope. That prompted hundreds of thousands of people to congregate at the Edsa Shrine.

We leave it to the academic experts to determine why it is these voting anomalies that exercise our civic energies so; why charges of “daya” are more potent than accusations of corruption.

But there is a valid way of alleging electoral fraud.

In Marcos’ case, it was the combination of the Commission on Elections workers’ walkout, the multiple instances of vote-buying and voter intimidation, the lawsuits, eventually the confessions. When the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines issued its historic pastoral statement declaring that Marcos no longer had the moral authority to serve as president, it was based, solidly, on evidence.

In Arroyo’s case, it was the damning recording, played over and over again, which convinced many that there was in fact a conspiracy to rig the elections the old-fashioned way: through the manipulation of the canvassing stage.

The allegations of election fraud, later downscaled to concerns, raised by vice presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. do not pass this test.

To summarize his statements and those of his spokespersons: The current lead enjoyed by the Liberal Party’s vice presidential candidate Leni Robredo is suspicious because Marcos Jr. began the quick count with a head start and at one point even had a 1-million-vote edge over Robredo. Robredo’s suspicious surge began when there was a supposed tweaking of the script that runs the transparency server sometime during election night.

Other arguments offered by his supporters include one from statistics: The linear progression of the votes for Robredo did not follow a random pattern. There was also one based on, well, denial: Who is this obscure Robredo, and where did her votes come from?

A whole army of statisticians and data experts has emerged to debunk the analysis offered by academics Antonio Contreras and David Yap, who do not hide their support for Marcos Jr. Simply put, their reading is wrong because they assume randomness where there is none. The obscurity argument doesn’t work either; Robredo was in virtual ties with Marcos Jr. in the last three preelection surveys—and in fact campaigned in about twice as many areas as he did. The 1-million-vote edge is explained by the fact—available to many on election night—that the early transmissions were from Marcos bailiwicks. As for the supposed script tweak: This can be simply resolved by stopping the main and transparency servers in the presence of observers and comparing the contents.

What Marcos Jr. should have done is show his copies of the election returns, and compare these with the tallies he suspects are fraudulent. He hasn’t done that, and we wonder why. Instead he has called on the Comelec to stop the quick count (required by both law and equity). As that classic TV commercial from the 1980s spoofing the lack of proof phrased it: Where’s the beef?