Meoni Erika Fajardo Bergara, 18, daughter of Mina Fajardo, is a first-time voter this year. She writes: “My mother was a part of the 1986 Commission on Elections [Comelec] walkout. That may not mean much to many.”
Wrong. The 1986 Comelec walkout haunts electoral automation today, a ghost that is made more scary by the thought that this generation of Comelec people will not have the idealism of those in 1986 who were, ironically, trained by dictatorship to value professionalism. Democracy only encourages people to be sloppy in mind and morals.
Meoni Erika goes on, “It [the 1986 Comelec walkout] is a historical event that remains humbly in the shadows of everything else that awakened the Filipino people and contributed to the first Edsa revolution.”
Wrong again. Far from staying in the shadows, the 1986 Comelec walkout is the elephant in the room of automated elections. The walkout triggered the fast events that led inexorably to the end of one form of the government—dictatorship, even as a walkout this coming May will and should end democracy in our country. When a dictatorship totters by an act of conscience on the part of those who serve it—like the 1986 Comelec workers did because you cannot have real elections under a dictatorship (to be sure, the South Korean junta repeatedly conducted clean elections to check out where the opposition areas were to clamp down on them). But when an act of conscience shakes a democracy, it is not from a blow coming from outside or inside, but from a rotting of its moral fiber; democracy is moral or it is worse than dictatorship because it means the triumph of mass ignorance and mass moral turpitude in every case.
There is no ignorance or malevolence worse than that of common folk who let themselves be deluded, or who give in to the cheapest human instincts, and by the force of their numbers makes evil prevail with the irresistible force of a seeming moral, though in reality a false certitude.
The Comelec walkout group insists that a mere walkout for refreshments—to get over the shock of their discovery of computerized fraud—had turned out into the walkout that toppled a government.
They insist that a walk to the refreshments counter was just given a spin—I suppose by people like myself in the Corazon Aquino camp—that would give the lie to the American insistence that there was cheating on both sides. That’s what Ronald Reagan said to the Filipinos’ dismay—but to my tired sense of satisfaction that I was right again.
But it did not look to me, or to the country, like a walkout for refreshments. The grim look on the faces of the Comelec group did not show thirst but rather an iron resolve to have no part of a show staged by an American-backed dictatorship. The spin that we gave it would fling Reagan’s friend Ferdinand Marcos and Nancy Reagan’s friend Imelda Marcos out of power and out of the country.
The Comelec walkout group members describe themselves as unwitting tools of history. I believe them. History turns on accidents. But accidents must be well prepared for to make them historical events.
And so, in the darkness, as the Comelec girls exited the hall, they were grabbed by men in uniform. Mark Brown and I—alerted to or prescient of what was coming that night had gone to Philippine International Convention Center—jumped on the men, shouting to leave the women alone. I tackled one but only managed to wrench something from his hand, an ID card. Oddly, he didn’t even try to hit me back. Instead, he rushed with a woman in his arms to a line of waiting vehicles. Mark and I grabbed a car. But why was one available? We followed the convoy speeding down the boulevard to Baclaran Church into which they vanished. But at the altar, standing tall was US Sen. John Kerry, telling us, “That’s as far as you go.”
After we came to power, Cory met with the Reform the Armed Forces Movement. Among the young officers was a Col. Kapunan, whose face I recognized from the ID I had snatched. He was there that night, waiting in the darkness, to protect Linda Kapunan if something went wrong. Coincidence? Maybe.
The Comelec walkout may not have been planned by those who carried it out, but it was part of a larger design that German theologian Wolfgang Pannenberg described as the intervention of God in history, no longer by His own Hand and Person, but through the unwitting acts of the men and women who make history, wittingly or no, like the women of the 1986 Comelec walkout. (And so I described it in Cory’s speeches; but why did I study Pannenberg years before the snap election and the Edsa People Power Revolution?)
The Comelec 35 has not been forgotten. Their defiance haunts, like the ghost of electoral indignation, the automated election law I sponsored; which, I was witless not to realize, removes human agency and, therefore, human conscience from computerized elections.
Automated elections automate I wonder what—the vote or electoral fraud? In practical terms, we will never know. There is no way to find out. The audit trail is casually treated as meaningless. And there is no way the Comelec will help you to uncover its own fraud.