Demanding COMELEC Accountability for the 2007 Elections
July 5, 2007 by kontradaya
Even with the results in and most of the winners proclaimed, the controversy surrounding the May 14 elections is far from over.
The recently concluded polls again demonstrate a pattern of massive, deeply-rooted, systematic fraud and violence rivalling those in previous elections. The onslaught of cheating, threats and intimidation, brutality and bloodshed, could have been worse had it not been for the efforts of a vigilant citizenry, the mass media and various poll watchdogs.
The latter have gathered vital documentary and testimonial evidence of vote-shaving, vote-padding, vote-buying, disenfranchisement and fabricated election documents, all of which constitute the crime now defined as electoral sabotage.
Most alarmingly, the worst examples of fraud, violence and disenfranchisement have pointed to administration candidates as the intended beneficiaries. What is arguably the single most glaring example of systematic and wholesale cheating is the result of the elections in Maguindanao wherein a statistically improbable “0″ vote count was recorded for non-administration senatorial candidates amidst serious allegations of disenfranchisement and fabrication of election documents.
It is inevitable that the tainted results of the May 2007 elections have revived the issue of the sham elections of 2004. The personalities questioned in the alleged fraud of 2004 are the same as those implicated in the charges of cheating today. These issues will continue to hound President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo until a just and credible resolution is reached.
Meanwhile, we as a people cannot simply “move on” and close over this dirty chapter in our nation’s history…not when the issues of fraud then as now remain unresolved. There can be no “moving on” when there is no accountability. There can be no serious electoral reforms, so long as cheats are allowed the use of government positions with which to evade the reach of justice.
The current and former top officials of the Comelec, especially those who have already been implicated in the controversial Garcillano scandal, must be made accountable for the tainted outcome of the 2007 elections. A case in point is Comelec’s inaction over erring Maguindanao election supervisor Lintang Bedol and his conspirators over the past three years. Its kid gloves treatment of Bedol today, despite dramatic sound bytes from several Commissioners, demonstrates both the Comelec’s inutility and its culpability in this year’s scandalously fraudulent, anomalous and violence-ridden polls.
For starters, an impartial and thoroughgoing investigation must be initiated in the Senate, if legislated electoral reforms are to have any substance and meaning. The end goal must be to charge the sponsors and “operators” of election cheating, then and now.
Accountability of election officials: The electorate deserves it, we demand it.
