PH elections controlled by foreign company

Rina Jimenez-David said it well in her May 6 column (“The price we’ll pay,” Opinion): How cheaply we sell our freedoms! How easily we give up our democracy!

Elections, supposedly, show democracy in action. In elections, everybody is equal. A rich man’s vote counts no more than a poor man’s. But whether election results reflect the will of the majority is altogether another story.

Every election we see how “democracy” is bastardized by many candidates and those in power using goons, gun and gold. We have seen how they insult the sensibilities and intelligence of the electorate with  shallow, cheap and  trivial  campaign gimmicks and propaganda. In our case, we have seen our elections marred by fraud and other nefarious schemes.

Nanay Bising, an urban poor community leader in Quezon City rues: “I cast my vote every election and each time, I wished for significant change to happen in our country. Candidates tell us they are for us. But after the voting, it becomes difficult even just to have an audience with them.”

As Lucy Parsons, a labor leader in 1870s, cautioned: “Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.”

Indeed, never be deceived: Our elections have always been controlled by the elite and ruling class and by big businesses, including foreign-owned entities, now including Smartmatic.

The Commission on Elections entered into a P7.862-billion contract with this company for the lease or purchase of optical machine readers. Smartmatic’s website says: “We’re not an elections company. We’re the elections company.” It is the company whose business is to run elections. However, we are not unaware that once a service becomes a private and profit-oriented enterprise, it has little, if any, interest in promoting the welfare of the people.

Similar to the privatization of basic services like transportation, health and education, our elections have been placed under the control of Smartmatic. Putting it more bluntly, a foreign firm now controls our

elections.

How then could we even expect our elections to be fair, honest, transparent and credible? Smartmatic has been engaged in previous elections. Former chief justice Artemio Panganiban has this to say about the “vulnerabilities” that attended the Smartmatic-“controlled” 2013 elections: “PCOS machine malfunctions, defective compact flash cards, transmission glitches, canvassing connectivity problems, uncertified source codes, counting inaccuracies, long queues of voters due to wrong precinct clustering, vote-buying, violence and other irregularities” (“Legality and technology,” Opinion, 2/9/13).

With the Commission on Elections acting as its agent, Smartmatic became richer

in 2016.

I cannot believe how we have cheaply surrendered our right to choose our leaders to a private, foreign company.

God, please have mercy on us.

—NORMA P. DOLLAGA,

deaconess, Kapatirang Simbahan

Para sa Bayan

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