General Admission
Formula for election success
By Al S. Mendoza
I just don’t know if somebody had already proposed it.
As far as I know, no one from either the Congress or Senate had done it.
But if I’d been beaten to the draw, which I doubt it very much, I would strongly back it.
Yes, I am talking about the 2016 elections.
And I have one suggestion to make voting and counting virtually cheat-free and smooth as silk.
Read on.
Look, not even one of our top honcho at the Comelec had thought about it all these years.
Which is simply surprising, if not downright appalling.
Look, elections are but barely 10 months away.
And here we are again, rushing to make quick-fix solutions to assure the nation of a credible poll.
Why we haven’t learned from past mistakes boggles the mind.
Sadly, it happens all the time.
Why we kept on treating every election a problem instead embracing it as a simple democratic routine smacked of our leaders’ seemingly latent inability to find the cure since the invention of bath soap.
Hey, this is the nation’s favorite past time next only to basketball and we are quarreling over what rules are going to apply—again and again and again.
What’s happening to this country, indeed?
Not only seemingly but obviously, it happens all the time, this bickering, this debate and this endless habit to find a way to solve this malady.
Election chief Andy Bautista, instead of already putting an election system in place, is still busying himself finding ways to untangle the mess of which election process to adopt.
First, he said the PCOS (Precinct Count Optical Scan) machines used in the 2013 elections had become decrepit and unworthy of use.
Second, he said we consider the OMRs (Optical Mark Readers)—what are those, from Uranus?—and in separate quantities yet: 23,000 and 70,977.
Third, he said we could go hybrid.
Even Comelec’s definition of hybrid appears Jurassic.
How can hybrid be defined as a manual counting of votes?
If motoring, if you say hybrid, it is the most advanced car in the automotive business.
Hybrid is manual counting and yet, it would cost us P16 billion—the most expensive of the three.
Isn’t this a contradiction, an empirical irony?
Refurbishing the 82,000 PCOS machines that made P-Noy president in 2010 and Grace Poe as No. 1 senator in 2013 would cost “only” P2.88 billion; adopting the OMRs “only” P10.3 billion.
Battered, bothered and bewildered?
Now, please give way to my brilliant idea [ahem!] to simplify the 2016 election.
Save for the local voting, make both the senatorial and presidential election three-fold.
First, hold it in Luzon.
Second, in the Visayas two weeks after.
Third, finally in Mindanao two weeks also after the Visayas election.
This way, cheating will be minimized—if not totally eradicated.
With lesser people to manage, with fewer votes to count, and with so much time to be spent to complete the voting process, election becomes a breeze—literally.
That is all, your honors.
(For your comments and reactions, please email to: punch.sunday@gmail.com)
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