A golden opportunity?

Sabi ni Rina Jimenez David na "golden opportunity" raw yung pag-resign ni Abalos para repormahan ang COMELEC.

Golden Opporutunity? Okey sana kung yung mag-aapoint ng commissioners ay matino at mapagkakatiwalaan. Sino ba ang mag-aapoint? Hindi ba si Maam Arroyo ulit? At this point, can you really trust Arroyo to appoint credible people at the COMELEC, Supreme court or any other positions in government anymore?

Great minds think alike. Pareho kami ng posisyon ni de quiros:

And why on earth would anybody imagine that Abalos’ departure from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) would naturally make the Comelec better, or as a couple of people put it, give it a chance at reform? Alberto Lim of the Makati Business Club says there will be two vacancies in the Comelec early next year that should give Malacañang the chance to appoint officials who are “competent, with probity and credibility.” Henrietta de Villa says Abalos’ problems had “hampered the Comelec from doing its job,” and with his resignation, we can now proceed to conduct “clean and credible elections.”

Well, who in God’s name appointed Abalos, and coddled him after he had bungled, wittingly or unwittingly, deal after deal costing the taxpayers billions of pesos, chief of them awarding the computerization of canvassing to a company that was not fit to bid; after he had shamelessly made Juan Miguel Zubiri a senator of this land at the expense of Aquilino Pimentel III by insisting on counting the tainted votes from Maguindanao province and after meeting with Zubiri’s father in Shangri-La (he also has a habit of bumping into the wrong people at the wrong time, which is really for him the right people at the right time); after the Neda chief reported him to his boss as offering him a couple of hundred million pesos as though it were his to give? The same person Lim and De Villa now expect to appoint competent, honest and credible officials.

Incidentally, that was an eye-popping remark by De Villa: “With his resignation, we can now proceed to conduct clean and credible elections.” That’s as clear an admission as any that it was impossible to have that while Abalos was there. But which again brings us to why he was there in the first place and has been there all this time: Which is that the person who appointed him and kept him there wanted him to not conduct clean and credible elections. Which is that the person who appointed him and kept him there would never have been in any position to appoint or keep anyone if he had merely conducted clean and credible elections, particularly in 2004.

Hindi naman talaga si Abalos ang main problem sa COMELEC kung titignan mo ng mabuti. Like Garcillano and Bedol, Mr. Abalos is just a henchman.

Yung nag-appoint at promo-protekta sa mga ungas na commissioners na ito ang tunay na problema.

UPDATE: I have to disagree with Rina on Computerization too. Sabi niya:

The most pressing of these reforms is computerization, reducing, if not eliminating entirely, the human “hands” that get in contact with ballots, tally sheets, canvassing forms, statements -- and in the process manage to lose, replace, revise, and reconfigure them and thus turn our elections into a sham.

True, we have been warned that computerization alone won’t be able to wipe out all forms of fraud or cheating. There are the “hands” (and duplicitous brains) involved, after all, in preparing the basic program that will run the software involved in reading and counting the ballots. Or even before then, the “hands” involved in preparing the registration rolls, which are the basic material on which clean, honest and credible elections are based. Still, computerization would make for a good start, and we can input all the protection measures we want right now, while we still have time to choose and pick among the many voting programs available.

Sen. Dick Gordon, whose pet measure has been computerized voting, says we don’t even have to write new programs or choose from among untested models. All around the world are computerized voting and counting systems that have long been used and proven successful. In Hawaii, for instance, he saw voting computers that even provided Ilocano translations of the instructions.

Rina, i don't think the lack of computerization is the cause of election fraud. And I don't give a shit about what Henrietta Villa, the CBCP or Dick Gordon has to say about that.

Computerization WILL make (MASSIVE) cheating EASIER to do, and HARDER to detect under the wrong hands, Rina. Because it is LESS transparent. That's a fact.

And believe it or not, MANUAL counting actually makes it easier to catch the cheaters. The problem in our case is that nahuhuli nga sila, pero HINDI NAMAN NAPAPARUSAHAN. Tignan nyo na lang si Virgilio Garcillano.

Nag-resign si GARCI, pero walang naparusahan sa GLORIAGATE scandal. SOUNDS FAMILIAR? Na-PROMOTE pa nga ang ibang mga lieutenants ni Garci eh.

Automized voting run by credible people is a tremendous positive.

But automized voting run by Arroyo's COMELEC will only make it easier for the bad guys to rig elections without getting caught. Unlike manual voting, it's going to be more difficult for media, much less ordinary people, to catch cheating. Not even computer experts (like Roberto Verzola) brought in by independent watchdog groups will be of much help in catching the operators within the COMELEC.