Life after elections
Two days after the midterm elections, the air still crackles with comments and complaints about the conduct of the democratic exercise—mostly revolving around the disconnect between Comelec’s claim of the “successful and peaceful” election and the voters’ contrary observation regarding the 600 malfunctioning vote-counting machines (VCM). Whether our bets won or lost, we will all continue losing if we dismiss these irregularities as “normal”, especially since the deals with Smartmatic have long been under question. These are worse than mere “technical glitches”, because it’s human beings, not machines that close deals leading to such unfortunate developments. And like it or not, they sow doubt and suspicion in the mind of voters. Would you not smell something fishy that the malfunctions and the delays in the transmission of results, et al, would be explained away by a simple “Java error”, or “walang signal” in the area? Or by the claim that the SD cards were “defective”