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The tragic state of Philippine public life is
crystallized in the buffoonery of all the characters involved in the
picaresque saga of Lintang Bedol.
After blatantly not doing his
duty as Commission on Election supervisor in Maguindanao—and
worse, allegedly conniving with others to frustrate the will of the
voters of that province—he refused to be contacted by his Manila
superiors. As far as everyone in Maguindanao knew he had
disappeared. He became unavailable for questioning about the true
facts of the conduct of the polls in that province and the fate of
election documents.
He finally surfaced—after the
Comelec threatened to order his arrest. On June 11, appearing at the
Comelec hearing to answer the questions his bosses and the entire
country were asking, all he could say was that all the election
documents had been stolen from him two weeks earlier. He could not
properly explain why he was in possession of the documents when
those should have been in proper safekeeping according to the
procedure in the Election Code and the Comelec rules. And his
explanation of his reluctance to obey his superiors’ orders to
come to Comelec sitting as the National Board of Canvassers on May
30 was that of a clown. He could not come to Manila because he had
not received his superiors’ subpoena and without a subpoena his
travel expenses would not be reimbursed.
He claimed that there was no
election fraud in Maguindanao but he could not explain how the
statistically improbable zero votes for 19 senatorial votes could
have happened. No municipal certificates of canvass were available
to back up the provincial certificate of canvass (COC) for
Maguindanao because these were lost or stolen, he said. So he was
asked by the media to describe how the elections were conducted in
that province. He claimed he could not reply to that question
because he was in another province on Election Day. But he could
swear to the correctness of the provincial COCs because these were
“duly executed.”
Bedol had collected all the
municipal certificates of canvass on May 28, two days before he was
needed in Manila by his Comelec superiors convened as the National
Board of Canvassers. On May 29 all these documents were allegedly
stolen from him.
The next joke he was to tell was
the answer to the question who could have stolen the documents from
his office. He said it could have been the group of people who
demonstrated against the Comelec and the authorities on May 29. And
he suggested that a case should be filed against those people.
The biggest buffoons of all at
this point were the entire Commission on Elections. Bedol’s
incredibly shameless performance neither made them puke nor blow up
in outrage.
Indecency
When the Comelec, en banc, found
Bedol guilty on Wednesday of indirect contempt—guilty of being
disrespectful—and nothing else, buffoonery became squalid
indecency.
It was as if they had decided to
shit on the Filipino people.
The congressmen and senators who
spoke of the verdict being wrong and the punishment of six months’
imprisonment and the fine of P1,000 being too light were too kind to
the Comelec.
For, by treating Bedol like a
naughty child and not a saboteur of our electoral democracy and a
destroyer our Republic, the Comelec has loudly proclaimed that
elections should not be taken seriously and that it is all right for
constitutional officials to be negligent, derelict and perhaps
corrupt.
Now more than ever the citizenry
has a reason to suspect the Comelec’s members—except for one or
maybe two—of knowing and condoning what Bedol really did. Why did
they allow Bedol to behave the way he has? Why did they reappoint
him to be an election supervisor in the 2007 elections even after he
was implicated in alleged election fraud in the 2004 elections?
The Comelec is a constitutionally
independent body. Its members can only be removed by impeachment.
The Fourteenth Congress has a
duty to prove its worth and integrity by impeaching the members of
the Comelec.
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