On the wrist
Lintang Bedol got a mere slap on the wrist, opposition politicians chorused yesterday, after the Commission on Elections (Comelec) en banc found the controversial provincial election supervisor of Maguindanao guilty of indirect contempt.Bedol was found guilty of four counts of what amounts to gross disrespect of the Comelec. “And since we found that he appears to have lost respect [for] the institution,” Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer said, “the institution, in an attempt [at] self-preservation, will have to show that [it] means business to discipline its own people.” Bedol’s penalty: up to six months in jail and a fine of P1,000.
Not surprisingly, the opposition found the sentence too lenient. “The Comelec is clearly treating Bedol with velvet gloves,” said Rep. Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel of the party-list group Akbayan. The "punishment is too light,” said Sen. Panfilo Lacson.
Compared to the many allegations of both retail and wholesale fraud that marred the vote in Maguindanao province last May, the penalty is certainly light. But it is important to remember that the “slap on the wrist” is only for one case, the one for indirect contempt. Nothing in the resolution suggests that the Comelec has given up on probing the allegations of election fraud, or that Bedol won’t be called to account for those same allegations in the future.
Indeed, the resolution ends by ordering the commission’s legal department to “determine whether or not any election offense or crime under the Revised Penal Code has been committed by ... Bedol, and to initiate the filing of the necessary charge/s therefor.”
It’s a slim hope, but we’ll take it.
We’ll take it, even though the resolution seems to have been written out of wounded institutional pride, with references to the Comelec’s “integrity” and to its “self-preservation and defense” littering the official prose. We’ll take it, even though we are fully aware that lesser penalties have been used to dodge any serious review of government corruption before. We’ll take it, even though Bedol walked free yesterday after posting bail, and even though he can still file a motion for reconsideration.
The possibility that he will be made to pay for his studied insolence (or perhaps it comes naturally to him?) is a small victory for election reformers, but it is, nonetheless, a victory.
* * *
In the face
The resolution finding Lintang Bedol guilty of indirect contempt should not lull the Commission on Elections (Comelec) into a false sense of complacency, into thinking it had swallowed the bitter medicine and done its duty.
Finding Bedol guilty was easy; now the hard work begins. After all, the real assault on the Comelec’s “integrity” did not take the form of Bedol’s haughty catch-me-if-you-can insolence; it consisted of the massive election fraud allegedly perpetrated by or under Bedol.
In other words, the pain that the election commissioners feel about the public esteem it has lost was caused, not by Bedol’s disrespectful conduct toward the commissioners, but by Bedol’s disrespectful conduct toward Maguindanao’s voters.
Sen. Rodolfo Biazon got it right: “What [Bedol] did with the CoCs [certificates of canvass that Bedol said were stolen] asked for by the Comelec was the most contemptuous act. What he did undermined the credibility of the election.”
It is for this very reason that the finding of guilt in Bedol’s indirect contempt case, while a small victory in itself, cannot be considered victory enough. By all accounts, the Maguindanao vote for national positions was inescapably tainted. And we mean all accounts, because even Comelec Chair Benjamin Abalos called the Maguindanao results statistically improbable, and even Team Unity’s spokesmen fumbled and named different candidates as rather conveniently topping the vote.
To be sure, Bedol’s official cockiness is grating, but we hope the Comelec realizes what the rest of the country already suspects: He is cocky not because he thinks he cannot get caught, but because if he gets caught, he will bring other election officers and perhaps higher officials down with him.
On this point public opinion is undeceived: Those who conspired to manipulate the Maguindanao vote slapped the Comelec in the face.
