Congratulations, Mr. Duterte

WE can breathe a sigh of relief that our country was able to conduct an election with almost none of the nightmare scenarios happening. The automated voting system, while it certainly did not work perfectly, did not suffer a massive breakdown, and the areas that did experience technical problems were a relatively tiny fraction of the whole. Although there was violence in some areas, which is always tragic and never acceptable, on balance the electoral exercise was more peaceful than it has been in past elections.

We still believe, however, that Smartmatic and the Aquino-Malacañang-Liberal Party conglomerate did something to subvert the true will of the people. The strange sudden shifts in the vote count could have happened only by the use of software management by experts who knew how to instruct the Vote Counting Machines to manipulate the numbers.