Allow me to start off with a famous O.B.Q. (Original benign0 Quote):

The trouble with wiping dust off a mirror is that we get a clearer image of ourselves.

- benign0

As such, I cannot agree more with what Norman Sison wrote in a comment on Cocoy’s brilliant piece “Missing the Point on the Road to 2010“:

[...] Credible elections, whether automated or not, is an expression of the people’s will. Otherwise, a government ceases its reason for being, or raison d’etre, once it no longer reflects the people’s will. That’s how a democracy works.

Yes indeed.

“Credible elections” will in principle give a more accurate reflection not only of the “people’s will” but also the people’s character.

So lets put a number on the qualifier “credible”. Say, a 95% accurate (i.e. the remaining 5% attributable to uncertainty resulting from fraudulent activity) election result constitutes a “credible” outcome.

Thus;

A 95% accurate election outcome can be considered to be a credible reflection of “the people’s will”.

Now let’s say, for argument’s sake, that today’s elections are 75% accurate. This “75% accuracy” metric can be taken to imply that the current crop of politicians sitting in comfy offices in Congress reflect the character of the Filipinos to an accuracy of “only” 75%. Given the kinds of adjectives we love to use to describe our politicians, we can further infer that these same adjectives describe the character and will of the electorate to an accuracy of 75% as well, right? That’s because, in this example, we can be sure only with 75% confidence that our leaders embody the will and character of the electorate.

To digress a bit, consider this confronting question…

Who is the most feared politician today in terms of his “winnability”?

[Hint: Both his nickname and surname start with an "E". ;) ]

… and then hold that thought while we move along under the same thought experiment I introduced earlier:

Today we can find comfort in giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt to the tune of 25% uncertainty that our politicians are an evil lot and that we are all victims of an Evil Empire. Kung baga all the troubles we seem to battle in our efforts to represent our interests in Government have to do with that 25% rate of uncertainty in the legitimacy of our representatives’ and executives’ claim to the offices they currently hold.

Now envision a world in which a successful computerisation of elections was implemented in the Philippines along with a successful control over the non-automated processes involved in handling and encoding the vote into said systems. Presumably we’d have that 95% credibility in our elections to enjoy in such a world. Woo hoo!

Bring your thoughts back to that feared politician I mentioned earlier, and there’s the rub:

Winnable politicians will still win in such a world.

The criteria for who gets to rule and who gets to legislate in our sorry society does not change.

This hypothetically credible election has the following effects:

:D It reduces the credibility of our excuses for staging ocho-ocho “revolutions” from 25% to 5%; and,

:D It reduces the credibility of our excuses for not taking accountability for the quality of our Government from 25% to 5%.

Call it benign0’s brilliant Law of Conservation of Credibility. Every new capability acquired changes the landscape of accountability we face. The ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in that 1986 “revolution” removed what at the time was seen as the singular excuse for our chronic failure to prosper as a nation. It took more than 20 years since that “solution” for us to appreciate the reality that Marcos alone did not account for our chronic impoverishment.

We need to apply that twenty-year lesson in the way we regard our so-called “politics” today, especially considering that the moral asendancy of today’s “Opposition” is not as clear-cut as it was in 1986.

In the case of “poll automation”, for example, the spin created by the pontifications of today’s “Opposition” easily lead public perceptions down dead-end routes. And as such…

Many Filipinos have held high hopes that automation would help plug opportunities for mass cheating through changing of the results when they are unduly delayed by slow counting. The withdrawal of TIM has heightened concerns that the 2010 election might not be held or that an election marred by fraud might lead to a failure in election, providing an excuse for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to declare a national emergency which would result in the extension of her term beyond 2010.

… that’s what people who are not much into the habit of thinking are routinely led to believe. The reality is that whether or not there is an on-going initiative to “automate” elections, politics have a way of subverting even the best laid governance plans — including one that involves a scheduled election.

And while “[...]proponents of automation have offered it as a panacea for clean election [...]“, the fact is…

[...] It is not. The machines will be fed with returns collected by the Comelec and will be operated by technicians. A quick count system can only deliver results swiftly, but if the inputs are not honest or have been tampered with, the tabulation would not reflect the popular will. Such a system, if tampered with, could only facilitate mass cheating.

Modern or primitive methods applied, Philippine elections will remain essentially the same in practice. And we can find comfort in that reality in the way we will continue to remain happy in the comfy delusion that we are the righteous but hapless victims of a perceived circumstance (i.e. the “evilness” of politicians) that is way past its use-by date.

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