Yours truly waiting for Nora Aunor to finish shading her "vote" at 'TAPAT' mock elections. Man in purple shirt behind Nora is National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera. |
After President Aquino heaped
fulsome praise on DILG Secretary Mar Roxas in his State of the Nation Address
last Monday, all media deserted other personalities and swarmed
around Mar in the House lobby, pressing him for a statement on the informal
launch of his candidacy. No, said the LP presidential bet prudently at that
point, “Don’t read it as a launch,” but
he promised to continue P-Noy’s “Daang Matuwid.”
Pundits are now outdoing one
another in assessing just whether the President's grand plug for Roxas’ candidacy last Friday at historic Club Filipino would boost
or harm his prospects for the presidency, once occupied by his
grandfather whose name he bears---the late President Manuel A. Roxas.
The question political
pundits are tripping all over now is the tantalizing predicament of Mar: Is
P-Noy’s all-out support a boon or a curse for him? Coronation or crucifixion?
XXX
Let me illustrate my theory with
an incident last weekend while I was buying medicines at a Mercury
branch. I overheard two salesladies talking, where one said, O ano, eh di si
Mar na ba? The other shook her head, asserting, “Ah naku, never.” When the latter
gave me my meds, I asked her, why not Mar? She replied that this candidate might
as well skip Leyte in his campaign as he’d get no votes there. Her eyes then
welled up and fighting back tears she narrated that she lost a two aunts
and two cousins in “Yolanda,” and alleged that the P-Noy administration, with its point
man there, Mar Roxas, has done little to alleviate the sufferings of people
there, many of whom still live in tents.
UN special rapporteur
Chaloka Beyani echoed the salesgirl’s reading when he recently said that nearly
two years after Yolanda battered Tacloban the government “still has not done
enough” for those left homeless. To which the Palace could only weakly respond
that it would build more houses for them from hereon.
XXX
This is the agony of Mar
Roxas. In the Arroyo administration, before he joined the Hyatt 10 in demanding
GMA’s resignation, Roxas as Trade Secretary was publicly credited with successfully pushing
and promoting PH’s business process out-sourcing industry and nobody can take this away from him.
He was riding high up to that point, clearly in his element and milieu as a self-confident hard-driving technocrat.
In addition, he has what
other politicians could only envy: an eminent political pedigree backed up by enormous
family wealth and a Wharton education and Wall Street experience. Moreover, he gained sympathy points when he unselfishly gave
way to Sen. Benigno Aquino III in what seemed like a call of destiny for the latter.
XXX
But unfortunately Mar has
also become identified with an administration that will be remembered for
monumental blunders, in addition to Yolanda’s winter of discontent--- such as
Mamasapano and questionable deals such as repeated allegations of PCOS machinations, incompetence
in public service (the MRT, port congestion, etc.) horrendous traffic in Metro
Manila, etc.
When the sharp technocrat was moved to DILG which was conceived to be his springboard to the presidency, he was re-tooled
to be a man of the masses which he is not (thus, social media bloomed with contrived photos of Mar hammering a loose desk, carrying a sack of onions or rice from the pier and riding a pedicab in the storm). But more importantly, he was painted as a most faithful P-Noy follower, but this only made him look like the uncomplaining doormat
of P-Noy.
Folks assert that Mar's shining moment could have been his dramatic resignation when he, supposedly with jurisdiction over the PNP, was bypassed in the Mamasapano tragedy. Even the ill-disguised political courtship by P-Noy of Grace Poe didn’t help Mar’s wimpy image.
Folks assert that Mar's shining moment could have been his dramatic resignation when he, supposedly with jurisdiction over the PNP, was bypassed in the Mamasapano tragedy. Even the ill-disguised political courtship by P-Noy of Grace Poe didn’t help Mar’s wimpy image.
XXX
But as Philippine politics goes, the plus side for Mar
would be the employment of the entire LP political machinery---the most
powerful political machine ever assembled here. And if you believe Prof.
Leonor Briones, ex-Sen. Panfilo Lacson and party-list Rep.Terry Ridon, there's are DAP resurrections in the hundreds of millions of pesos embedded in the 2016
budget, that will surely fuel that machinery and mobilize LGUs for Mar. Critics assert that the 2016 budget is ill-disguised election budget.
Speaking of voting machines,
it is ironic that the lack of time for testing was used as reason, among others, why the Comelec brushed aside a “lotto-style” voting machine billed as the "Transparent Election System" or "TAPAT" (True) for short, invented by a
Filipino father-and-son IT team and endorsed by the “Filipino IT for
Elections (FITFE) " experts.
A mock election was held two weeks ago with various personalities, including new Comelec Chief Andres
Bautista, Commissioner Rowena Guanzon, Bishop Broderick Pabillo and celebrities like Nora Aunor and National Artist for Literature Bien Lumbera, invited, along with students, to test this new voting machine at the Pamantasan ng
Lungsod ng Maynila. Interestingly, Bautista's prompt reaction was to express fear that the voter verification list
that’s printed out by this machine after voting, would encourage
vote-buying!
But wasn’t it worse that
the old PCOS machines never even told us
whom we voted for in 2010 and 2013? Wasn’t this non-verification (all that the PCOS
machines said was, “Congratulations”) far more conducive to cheating and massive
vote-buying, and caused so much political instability?
XXX
Arnold Villasanta, 47, a
licensed electronics and communications engineer and graduate of the
Polytechnic University of the Philippines, and his son, Angelo Villasanta, 23, a
computer engineer and graduate of the Ateneo University, have designed this new voting
system as “an alternative solution to the PCOS machine.” The Villasantas’ invention,
billed as a “lotto-style vote-counting system,” will operate using the common TABLET everyone’s grandchild is familiar with.
The inventors, who run a
computer firm called A-GICT, connected the voting machine to a thermal printer
that would print out and furnish each voter the list of candidates he voted for---all told, taking a minute max. Moreover, the
Villasanta invention has a big memory (about 16 gigabytes) and can accomodate an
estimated up to 5,000 voters per precinct. In addition, a random manual audit
of votes is saved in the unit.
At the PLM mock election, the voting
machine tested was already the third version, which took 1 ½ months to develop. We “voters” shaded names of “candidates” for various posts in the ballots (mock “candidates” with photos were national artists of various disciplines, such as Franz Arcellana and NVM Gonzalez) and then fed these “ballots” into the Villasanta-designed voting machine.
Besides, we all know that mass vote-buying and selling are already planchado the day or evening before
elections.
XXX
What’s good about “TAPAT” is
that it’s Filipino-designed and more transparent as it tells us whom we
voted for, much cheaper at about P20,000 per machine, than the disgusting PCOS
machines which cost from P70,000 to P90,000 each. To import 93,977 new PCOS machines (as two bidders recently backed out of a refurbishment contract for those 89,000 old PCOS) an estimated P12.6 billion of tax-payers' money will be needed. Arnold Villasanta assures
that his firm can produce 100,000 TAPAT machines in five months and P20T cost per machine could even go down with volume.
The PCOS has already been
discredited all over the world, the latest in parts of the US; in fact many countries have returned to manual
vote. The big question is, why is Comelec, even with the new leadership, hell-bent on using NEW PCOS machines to be imported that, as Bautista has said about the Pinoy invention, has run out of time to test. Something's rotten and it's not in Denmark!
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