Election Success?!

It is said that the elections are successful by the public’s point of view. Perhaps, we really have such low standards.

I am not impressed by this election. The only reason people are crying “success” is because everything that led up to the elections – the whole PCOS brouhaha set up the notion of extreme doom and gloom.

It has been announced by Comelec that there was a 75% voter turnout and this is a so called successful number. BUT there were so many people complaining of long lines, heat exhaustion, a lot of people going home w/o voting. This does not even include the violence that sabotaged and deterred various polling operations. A lot of machines or cards were malfunctioning or ballots have been switched (like ballots for one province or locality was sent to another) and a whole lot of issues that caused delays, which obviously lowered the voter turnout.

In addition, places with malfunctioning machines (like the 65 in Isabella or the one in Aquino’s precinct) led people to just fill in the ballots but not feed it into the PCOS machines themselves. Rumors of ballot switching are alleged to happen at this point. A different set of filled out ballots are said to be fed into the replacement/fixed machines when the voters are no longer there. And, some flash cards were just delivered today, which means that the ballots will only be ran through the some machines today.

Add to all this, based on the parallel count of ABS-CBN (as of today) most of the precincts have only about 60+% voter turnout – not 75%.

And, I don’t buy the people touting that violence has been less this time around. The likely reason why violence is less (in number) this time is because the election process is shorter – when normally manual counting spells more manual ballot box snatching and the violence that goes with it.

So, this relative peace is more because the window of opportunity for violence got shorter, less because the Comelec or the police turned out to be extra efficient. It also does not mean that the intent for violence or manipulating the elections was reduced. They probably just found other, better or automated ways to cheat the system.

Yes, in a way, everything turned out to be better than expected. (However, I state this with a grain of salt because it is not over, until it’s over –that is, if there will be a smooth transition of government).

No, I am not particularly impressed. I don’t think we should celebrate this election and accept all the suspicious events that came with it – albeit by looking at mere statistics, they seem to be less than before.

It was a relatively peaceful elections. It was a relatively honest elections. There was relatively no cheating. RELATIVE - being the operative word.