Philippine voting lists contains multiple and dead voters!

Every election in the Philippines seems to involve some form of cheating or alleged cheating. The level of corruption is such that usually nothing is done to remedy the situation. Even so voters often manage to toss out many incumbents. There are to elections this May. This is from the Tribune.

Opening wide the cheating doors


EDITORIAL



All signs of electronic election fraud that is to be committed in May are present, yet the Commission on Elections (Comelec) commissioners continue to cast a blind eye on this.

Nothing, but nothing, is being done to cleanse the voters’ list of double and multiple registrants, a sure fire sign that ballots will be padded, especially as the ballots being printed are based on the number of voters, a sizable number of whom are double, multiple and dead voters.

It is hardly any secret to these commissioners that there exists the “Big Four” consisting of leaders of the poll cheating syndicate, that is known to the Comelec personnel to be at the top of the padding of votes. Yet the commissioners haven’t done anything to put a stop to this cheating syndicate. Why, when they have the power to throw the book at these executives who are said to be gang leaders?

The exposé on the double, multiple and dead voters, referred to as the “zombie” voters came sometime ago — with the poll body’s watchdog, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), submitting to the commissioners the list of zombie registrants. And from the list, it was very easy to spot these bogus voters, as the listing was alphabetical and the doubling and multiple names were evident.

The zombie voters could very easily have been delisted — and manually, too. Yet there were the commissioners, along with the executive director, Jose Tolentino, excusing this blatantly padded list as not being a deliberate ploy of these ghost voters to vote multiple times.

That really was a poor excuse. Deliberate or not, wouldn’t it be safer to purge these double and multiple entries from the list?

But no. They refused to do so, saying that purging the list is beyond their control, since it is the courts that have the jurisdiction on exclusion proceedings, even when this is a patently false claim.

If the cheating syndicate at the Comelec were not that influential, wouldn’t the commissioners then have insisted on purging the voters’ list of these multiple and dead voters, if only to prove that there will be clean, orderly and credible polls?