Buffoonery
The tragic state of Philippine public life is crystallized in the buffoonery of all the characters involved in the picaresque saga of Lintang Bedol.After blatantly not doing his duty as Commission on Election supervisor in Maguindanao—and worse, allegedly conniving with others to frustrate the will of the voters of that province—he refused to be contacted by his Manila superiors. As far as everyone in Maguindanao knew he had disappeared. He became unavailable for questioning about the true facts of the conduct of the polls in that province and the fate of election documents.
He finally surfaced—after the Comelec threatened to order his arrest. On June 11, appearing at the Comelec hearing to answer the questions his bosses and the entire country were asking, all he could say was that all the election documents had been stolen from him two weeks earlier. He could not properly explain why he was in possession of the documents when those should have been in proper safekeeping according to the procedure in the Election Code and the Comelec rules. And his explanation of his reluctance to obey his superiors’ orders to come to Comelec sitting as the National Board of Canvassers on May 30 was that of a clown. He could not come to Manila because he had not received his superiors’ subpoena and without a subpoena his travel expenses would not be reimbursed.
He claimed that there was no election fraud in Maguindanao but he could not explain how the statistically improbable zero votes for 19 senatorial votes could have happened. No municipal certificates of canvass were available to back up the provincial certificate of canvass (COC) for Maguindanao because these were lost or stolen, he said. So he was asked by the media to describe how the elections were conducted in that province. He claimed he could not reply to that question because he was in another province on Election Day. But he could swear to the correctness of the provincial COCs because these were “duly executed.”
Bedol had collected all the municipal certificates of canvass on May 28, two days before he was needed in Manila by his Comelec superiors convened as the National Board of Canvassers. On May 29 all these documents were allegedly stolen from him.
The next joke he was to tell was the answer to the question who could have stolen the documents from his office. He said it could have been the group of people who demonstrated against the Comelec and the authorities on May 29. And he suggested that a case should be filed against those people.
The biggest buffoons of all at this point were the entire Commission on Elections. Bedol’s incredibly shameless performance neither made them puke nor blow up in outrage.
Indecency
When the Comelec, en banc, found Bedol guilty on Wednesday of indirect contempt—guilty of being disrespectful—and nothing else, buffoonery became squalid indecency.
It was as if they had decided to shit on the Filipino people.
The congressmen and senators who spoke of the verdict being wrong and the punishment of six months’ imprisonment and the fine of P1,000 being too light were too kind to the Comelec.
For, by treating Bedol like a naughty child and not a saboteur of our electoral democracy and a destroyer our Republic, the Comelec has loudly proclaimed that elections should not be taken seriously and that it is all right for constitutional officials to be negligent, derelict and perhaps corrupt.
Now more than ever the citizenry has a reason to suspect the Comelec’s members—except for one or maybe two—of knowing and condoning what Bedol really did. Why did they allow Bedol to behave the way he has? Why did they reappoint him to be an election supervisor in the 2007 elections even after he was implicated in alleged election fraud in the 2004 elections?
The Comelec is a constitutionally independent body. Its members can only be removed by impeachment.
The Fourteenth Congress has a duty to prove its worth and integrity by impeaching the members of the Comelec.
