IN a corrupt society, like what we have in this country and where the conduct of elections is curiously automated, you can be sure that only the candidates with money, machines and skilled manpower (MMM) will win the poll.
Popular candidates without the three Ms will only be eating the dust of those they follow in the campaign trail, and this will become clearer by the day up to election day on May 9 and two or three weeks thereafter.
This is so because a popular candidate, usually a product of surveys and selective perceptions, will have a serious problem converting his or her popularity into votes that can be officially counted and tallied withoutthe three Ms.
Let us limit our simple analysis to the five presidential candidates: Vice President Jejomar C. Binay, former Interior Secretary Manuel A. Roxas II, Davao City Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte, Sen. Grace Poe and Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago.
Only two of these candidates, Binay and Roxas, are running under the two dominant parties—United Nationalist Alliance and Liberal Party—officially accredited by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to have watchers inside the polling precincts.
Compared to Roxas, Binay has better-trained poll watchers backed by over a million guardians, both retired and those still in the active service of the military and police organizations, who are in the network of his running mate, Sen. Gregorio B. Honasan.
Honasan may not be as popular as Sen. Francis G. Escudero, Sen. Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. or Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, but counting him out in the vice-presidential race might be imprudent, considering his own network, which also includes the Comelec-accredited party-list Rebolusyonaryong Alyansang Makabansa (RAM) and his ability to win. (Honasan has not lost an election ever since he entered politics.)
Confidential information relayed to Databank revealed 600,000 guardians will serve as special watchers in 10 regions for Binay, Honasan and retired Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim, who’s running as RAM party-list (No. 53 in the official ballot) No. 1 nominee for Congress, along with retired Navy Capt. Prospero Maligalig, retired Army Col. Alexander Noble and civilian member Jojo Cruz, as second, third and fourth nominees, in that order.
Seventeen teams of guardians, who are closely linked with one another via short-message service and multimedia-message service, have also been organized to protect Binay and other official opposition candidates against cheaters who might use preprogrammed data to alter the official election results, the information said.
Hackers, who called themselves Anonymous, stole the Comelec’s official biometric files as early as last year and systematically uploaded them early this month on several occasions on various web sites, using cutouts they themselves had cleverly set up to avoid detection.
Part of the information received by Databank showed that preprogrammed data in the form of memory cards and flash discs, which can be inserted into the vote-counting machines, are now being sold to moneyed candidates by unscrupulous people connected to some corrupt Comelec and Smartmatic officials.
The official Comelec data stolen by hackers included the huge biometric files of voters in 81 provinces, including the new province of Davao Occidental; 145 cities, including 35 highly urbanized; five independent component and 105 component cities; and 1,489 municipalities, spread in 17 regions throughout the country, including the National Capital Region (NCR).
The total number of biometric files of voters with complete names, fingerprints, pictures, cell phones and landline telephone numbers, individual addresses and the exact locations of the 87,000 clustered precincts they will be voting on election day is 54,363,329.
By regions, these are broken down to 6,253,249 voters in the NCR; 24,164,023 in Luzon; 11,316,792 in the Visayas; and 12,629,265 in Mindanao.
Demographically, 30 percent of the voters, or 16.3 million, are in the highly urbanized cities and provinces; the other 70 percent of the voters, or 38 million, better known as the masses, are in other smaller provinces, cities and municipalities.
This is where Binay and his supporters set up their network as early as two years ago, and that explains why he is very popular among the masses and the middle class in the countryside.
An 80-percent turnout of the 54.3 million voters would mean 43.5 million votes. The winning presidential candidate should get at least 10.8 million votes, or one fourth of the 43.5 million.
To contact this writer, e-mail at cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.
1 comment
bet wishes to Binay if he can make that, Mr. author. But, this time, voters are now more intelligent than before. good bye to old-school thinking of 3M’s. Though, Duterte has lacking some of the 2M’s (Money and machinery), yet he’s the overflowing support of the 3rd M(manpower). And this translates to his victory. That’s my prediction, wanna bet?