Automated barangay elections?
Gloria Arroyo strikes again all the way from left field with her proposal to auto-mate elections starting with the October 29 exercise covering barangay officials.For starters, there is no more time to prepare for automated elections which are scheduled in six weeks. Second, results of barangay elections do not require consolidation. Third, the barangay elections are nominally non-partisan. And fourth, as result of the second and third factors, barangay elections are hardly afflicted by the cheating, the buying of votes, the intimidation and the violence that characterize local and national elections.
In short, the barangay elections are not the problem. The local and national elections are. And automation, while it would help speed up the count, is a technical solution that misses out on the wider dimensions of the problem.
We don’t mean the sort of transformation in individual values that some argue is a prerequisite to an authentic exercise of the people’s sovereign power to elect their leaders. For we can storm the heavens with our prayers that the phone pals of Virgilio Garcillano be struck by their conscience and stop cooking the tabulations of votes, and only end up losing our belief in the power of prayer.
If we want honest and clean elections, we can start impeaching and jailing the election officials whose actions are for outright sale or, in the case of someone who is now in the limelight, in exchange for multi-million dollar- denominated overpriced deals.
But corrupt Comelec officials are the effects, not the cause, of a degenerate electoral process. For elections to be honest, we have to overhaul the structures and reverse the trends that make elections the equivalent of a war of total annihilation.
Joseph Estrada has just been convicted of plunder and sentenced to lifetime in jail. Many see his conviction as a triumph of the law. We certainly wish it were so, because we would be seeing most of the current high officials joining him in Bilibid in the not too distant future.
But the more likely outcome of Erap’s conviction is not the return of law. It is more likely to lead to a further travesty of the law.
Gloria is exiting in 2010. That certainly means a more dirty and bloody election for the presidency. Gloria will pull out all stops to secure the victory of her candidate, for she has to ensure she and her accomplices do not end up in the slammer like Estrada.
That’s the kind of dynamic we expect political developments to follow in the next three years and possibly further down the road. Computerization of elections is a minor sideshow to the grand drama unfolding before our eyes.
