Were we cheated in this elections? I don’t know. Are these elections credible? Not at all.
It’s not even just the results. It’s the irregularities we have heard and / or experienced, it’s the reports of broken down vote counting machines and faulty SD cards, and reports of voters’ receipts coming out with names they didn’t shade on their ballots, it’s the massive vote-buying on the ground that the police admitted to before election day.
But I think what makes this election incredible is not just what happened on the ground (and what was happening long before campaign period — we’ll get to that in another essay). It’s what happened when the precincts closed, and our votes were to be counted, transmitted from the vote counting machines all over the country to the COMELEC server and the transparency server in Manila.
And so we will repeat. On May 13, election day, at 7:00PM, what we had were results for .38% of votes cast. These results conveniently came from Ilocos Norte, so what we saw were names from Duterte’s slate.
And then … nothing.
At around 10:00PM, COMELEC tells the public two things. One, that there was NO problem with transmitting votes from the machines to the COMELEC and transparency servers; the problem was with the transparency servers being unable to “push” the data to the computers of PPCRV and the media laptops. Two, they were already addressing the problem as decided on by the COMELEC En Banc, and that they expected the number to move at 4:00AM on May 14.
On the surface, this sounds like it’s all above board: after all, lahat tayo nagkakamali, and tech breakdowns should be expected. BUT here’s the thing: there was NO I.T. PERSON explaining to the public what was going on with the transparency server, and as such there was NO CREDIBLE VOICE telling us that we didn’t have to worry at all about what was going on.
Worse: at around 2:00AM, if you were awake and watching the news as I was, results from the transparency server were suddenly released. So while the nation was sleeping, there were results for 92% of votes cast released. That jump, from .32% to 92% is important because the results were generally the same, practically no fluctuations, and no disruptions to the ranking of Senatorial winners.
On the morning of May 14, people woke up and the election count had practically been concluded, save for the final slots. And it looked exactly as it did before they slept on May 13.
At some point in the early morning of May 14, at around 5:40AM there was another error that pushed back the numbers from 92% to 49%.
And the rest is history.
It is important now to remember what happened to this count, because as with many things during Duterte season, it’s pretty clear that the powers-that-be will move hell and high water to get these Senators proclaimed, and sell this idea that these are the Senators we want and deserve.
The next three years, it will be important to remind ourselves: this 2019 electoral count has no credibility whatsoever. And as such these Senators who are nincompoops, human rights violators, plunderers, turncoats, landgrabbers — all of Duterte’s men and their dirty kitchen sinks — stand for not much else but the tech glitches that happened.
These Senators ARE the error of this technological mess that is COMELEC’s automated elections. And we will spend the next three years demanding that this error NOT happen again. ***