Rev. Fr. Benjamin Alforque, MSC
Prior to the May 9, 2022 elections the mechanisms for deception, cheating, fraud and usurpation of People’s Power in favor of the tandem of dictatorship and tyranny were already in place.
The Structure of the Cheating Machinery:
1. Imee Marcos chaired the Senate Committee on Electoral Reforms and People’s Participation.
2. The COMELEC was staffed with commissioners identified with the present Malacañang occupant as classmate, or schoolmate, co- provincianos from Davao and a former Marcos lawyer.
3. COMELEC printed more than 40 million ballots and configured SD card for the Smartmatic machines without any party representative or watchers present.
4. F2 Logistics, a company of the crony of the Malacañang occupant handled the transport of ballots, voting machines, SD cards, election returns and other election paraphernalia from the COMELEC to the precincts and back.
5. One presidential candidate boasted of having met governors and local executives, asking them to count the votes correctly and assuring them of help in their programs for their constituents.
In Philippine electoral realities, it is common knowledge that governors, representatives and local officials have mastered the SOPs of cheating, such as, but not limited to: (a) changing of COMELEC officers not favorable or beholden to them; (b) filling up of ballots and stuffing the boxes with these pre-shaded votes; and (c) even using the Sangguniang Kabataan officers and members to do these tricks by quarantining them for days prior to election day.
6. Red-tagging and creating fake public scandals were tools to discredit and destroy candidates, discourage their supporters and weaken their political machinery. The first target has always been the Left, and then the opposition, by linking the Opposition with the Communists.
7. The Coup-Martial Law-No Elections Options: there was a move to prevent a LeniKiko and Tropa victory, at all cost. This time politicians and the military came up with a fake excuse of a communist violent disruption of the electoral process which could force government and the military to postpone the elections, or declare no elections, until 6 months to a year, from May 9, 2022. In fact, massive opposition rallies were tagged as rehearsals for a new People Power Revolution, instigated by the Left.
Behind the scene was the huge army of trolls in the social media that were paid cultural apparatus tasked to glowingly paint the son of the dictator and the daughter of the tyrant as positive campaigners for unity, that Martial Law was the golden age of the Philippines and that the present Malacañang occupant picked up the progress of the country neglected by succeeding presidents after Martial Law.
A the same time these aggressively demonized most especially the LeniKiko tandem, the Tropa and Makabayan candidates with the most vile language, most hateful charges and lies ranging from the most laughable and degrading commentaries to the most immoral concoctions and demeaning sexual gossips. This use of social media included the mind- conditioning surveys that must be proved by the “results of the actual canvassing of votes, so quick and so massive, so that these results would appear unassailable and acceptable that, confused, the opposition and the masses would have no room to suspect and complain but be sad and lick their defeat in sorrow and grief and powerlessness and utter defeat!”
It can be said that these social media trolls as a cultural apparatus were tested in the 2016 elections. These trolls were also the indirect products of the techniques at disinformation, shaping public minds and influencing public opinion and perceptions used by Cambridge Analytica Ltd. (2013) whose paid services were secured by the politician and his family to “rebrand the Marcos family’s image on social media”.
From Election to Highway Robbery:
1. The COMELEC dismissed all cases against the son of the dictator swiftly going into election day.
2. Massive number of vote counting machines malfunctioned on election day.
3. Red-tagging and the intimidating presence of uniformed soldiers and police in the voting areas persisted in many areas, especially in the villages on election day.
4. Where there were no internet signals, vote counting machines continued to function on election day.
5. In absentee-voting countries, many were disenfranchised either because their names could not be located or had been altered, or the return-stamped envelopes containing the ballots lacked the correct amount of postage.
6. Vote-buying was most rampant on the eve of and on election day itself. One voter could earn as much as PhP 9,000.00 pesos on election day. In local parlance, this is called “gapangan”, (Tagalog), or “kamang” (Cebuano-Bisaya). The art of vote-buying in relation to voting was almost perfected this time: the vote-buyer signals the poll watcher whether the voter was bought or not. The poll watcher throws the signal to the person in the voting machine. The person in the voting machine can receive the ballot and by his fingers can maintain the cleanliness of the ballot cast or damage it so as to invalidate it. One would wonder where this inundation of never-ending money supply has been coming from. The thief was only fulfilling his promises to the bureaucrats he had bought.
7. In the counting of votes, many, mostly from the LeniKiko camp, complained of their votes not counted, as their candidate got zero votes. Moreover, the vote counting machines churned in in a matter of hours uniform percentages of votes cast, the votes garnered by the dictator-tyrant tandem as overwhelmingly leading the LeniKiko camp, thereby establishing a trend that followed the pre-election surveys, so massive and so patterned that these became glaringly statistically and mathematically impossible and incredible.
8. The trolls chimed in proclaiming the victory of the dictator-tyrant tandem according to the trends they established earlier, putting down the opposition and the masses by telling them to accept defeat and move on while sowing intrigues and confusion that not all is well inside post-election juicy positions.
9. The PPCRV and the NAMFREL were conned.
They were using the ERs from the COMELEC which the VCMs reported. “Idem per idem” – confirming the same with the same. The trusted instrument of the opposition for clean and honest election was turned against them by the same machinery that from the very start was the source of cheating and fraud.
10. Proof? The cheating machinery is almost fool-proof. There was no need – and as yet, none – of any militarist intervention. But you can ask your relatives and friends who are governors, congress representatives and mayors and barangay officials, military and police. They will glowingly and boastfully tell you how they did it, more perfect this time than before: ballot -shading and stuffing, and programming and vote-buying and signalling and intimidating and killing. For them this is fair election game, and all kinds of tricks can be applied. This is also a money-making game: one earns not only by vote-buying and selling but also by betting on who would win and who would lose, and by how much. But none of them would dare go to court as star witnesses of this subterfuge. That is why we should not take seriously the politicians’ demand that we present these evidence in court. There is simply none. And they know it. Unless a whistle-blower comes out ready to be destroyed and devoured by the legalese and gobbledygook of their lawyers who lie still.
Continuing Rape of Democracy – Usurpation of People’s Power:
The electoral process our country has experienced is actually an exercise of elite democracy: who among the ruling class of the landed gentry and the foreign big business through the government bureaucracy will produce and distribute the spoils of land products and import-export goods with the help of services which they own, including mercenary military and police services.
The People’s Power to govern has always been usurped by these pretenders in the bureaucracy. This time, the dictator-tyrant tandem, if allowed unchecked, will continue to divide and rule, sow confusion, and apply social media to the techniques of Goebbels and Machiavelli, a new group patterned after Hitler’s SS Troopers.
Therefore, let us disabuse ourselves of blaming the poor and their lack of education for selling out to the dictator-tyrant gang. The system is simply broken, and the poor have always been the constant victims of abuse, deprivation, neglect, impoverishment, exploitation and slavery by the ruling class. Blame rather the tyrant and the dictator’s son – and the emerging dictator-tyrant gang – and their cabal of plunderers, thieves, criminals and killers.
Therefore, there is no reason to concede defeat. There is all the more reason to right the wrong.
Do not also be misled by pious incantations of church leaders and their followers who blame God, saying: the Lord has forgotten us…or we are being tested by God. And so this is God’s own making? The Myth of Deus ex machina is poised upon us ready for the taking. A Christianization that served the colonial powers and their ruling puppets.
Rather, we have forgotten the Kingdom of God at work now in us and in our history. We have chosen as church to accommodate ourselves into the system that is the anti-thesis of God’s Reign. We have long abandoned the poor, left them to fend for themselves, victims of feudal lords and big business and bureaucrats who we dare not offend and from whose largesse we shared and profited. And if ever we did support the victims of the system under which we have flourished, and denounced their victimizers and killers, we have done so in a charitable and humanitarian manner, in a way that is seasonal and phlegmatic.
The Continuing Challenge: Assert People’s Power Now!
There is only one road to genuine democracy: People’s Empowerment and Participation through the Cross.
1. “Synoecism”: The Biblical Attempt at an Alternative Community-Organization Where The People Lived and Shared for the Common Good.
2. “Seisachtheia”: Cancelation of Debts, Inter- personal, Social, National and International So That Everyone and All Nations Can, in Solidarity, Work for the Common Home in Equal Footing.
3. Land to the Tiller: Genuine Agrarian Reform.
4. Countryside Development: Dispersal of Development Projects to the Countryside and Protection of the Environment and Natural Resources and Indigenous Peoples and Dwellers.
5. National Industrialization: Basic Industries in the Hands of Filipino Nationalists and Patriots.
6. Genuine Education: “A Cultural Action for Freedom” as a Subversive Activity for Integral Total Liberation.
7. International Solidarity: Oneness with the Peoples of the World in the Quest for Justice and Peace and Integrity of Creation.
These are actually the muted aspirations of the poor, articulated in history by the logic of the minority, by the prophets, by Jesus and the New Humanity. We must believe that the poor who struggle to build the Church of the Poor are calling us, inviting us to form alternative communities of faith that serve the Kingdom, rather than the Church, that is ourselves. There lies our continuing conversion: “Blessed are you poor for yours is the Kingdom of God! (Luke 6:20)”
Beyond the elections of May 2022, where there is no concession to defeat but only to right the wrong: Let us continue to be burnt by the Holy Spirit from within. Let conflagration be our action. Let liberation be our eternal vision. Let solidarity be our incessant urgent call! And “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the cause of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:10).
