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Batas Mauricio

IF I am to believe the claims made in public yet by lawyer Rey Quilala, a former legal officer at the office of Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III, there is no way that the Filipino people can be assured of the truthfulness of the results of the 2016 national and local elections.

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Quilala disclosed that while Smartmatic Philippines Inc. is saying that the automated system it is employing in the 2016 elections (which it likewise employed during the 2010 and 2013 elections) is as secure as the systems being employed by international banks, it has been shown by recent events, particularly the theft of some US$100 million from the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York, that these systems are capable of being hacked and manipulated.

That being the case, Quilala in effect raised grave doubts that the true will of the Filipino people, especially on the president and vice president that are to lead this country in the next years, may not be reflected in the results that the Commission on Election will use to proclaim the winning candidates. Wow! Truly disturbing, and truly discouraging.

Quilala also confirmed that in the 2013 elections which was conducted using the technology provided for by Smartmatic Philippines Inc., some 13 million or so votes were not included in the determination of who really won as senators in that political exercise, because of a failure of transmission that hit the computers that were used then.

Indeed, 13 million votes are 13 million votes, enough to affect the entire outcome of that midterm elections. I do not wish to speculate now on who could be considered as having truly won as senator at that time, but the point is that, if a computer system such as the one which Smartmatic used in 2013 failed to include in its final tally 13 million votes, must we trust that system again in 2016?

What is more, Quilala said he and other lawyers were treated to the spectacle of their cellphones losing their signal at the “command” of computer experts from a country known as Estonia with their systems being cloned to send messages or data which the phone owners did not really send or transmitted.

This sent shockwaves to those who listened to Quilala, when they realized that it is really possible to jam the signals of Smartmatic’s computers and then, making it appear that those computers are sending results to the different canvassing boards in the country and, ultimately, to the national canvassing agencies who are tasked to tally the votes and then proclaim the supposedly winning candidates.

The question, of course, is: if these computer maneuvers can be demonstrated to distort even the computers which are being used in our forthcoming elections, how come no one seems to be truly interested to find a solution to prevent election fraud using information technology?

I am of course referring to the presidential candidates who are now locked in a very tight race for the top spot, but who seem oblivious to these problems (which to me is simply unacceptable) or who are outright ignorant of how these problems can affect their candidacies. Why the inaction, ladies and gentlemen? Indeed, these candidates owe their voters the duty to safeguard the vote of every citizen!

There is something scandalously anomalous in the famers’ barricade in North Cotabato which is now being derisively called as the Kidapawan Massacre: it would seem that the Aquino government had plenty of money that it could have used to buy rice for distribution to the hungry Mindanao farmers, but it refused to part with that money inexplicably!

The 2015 budget of the Aquino government–which was the budget in force when the Kidapawan Massacre happened on April 1, 2016–allocated some P88.8 billion for agriculture. Among the programs intended to be funded by that huge allocation was “providing credit for farmers and fisherfolk through the Agriculture Credit Policy Council” (see http://www.rappler.com/move-ph/issues/budget-watch/65227-aquino-2015-agriculture-budget).

The troubling question is, why did not the Aquino government find it in hits heart to use even just .0001 percent of that huge budget to buy the rice that the hungry farmers were asking to be given them? Was it because there is really no concern for the small and the marginalized among the government’s top officials, or was it because the budget is already totally spent at this point? Or, was there simply a failure of governance here?

What this shows is that, the Aquino government and its top officials are pseudo-Christians, or Christians who profess their faith merely through their lips but not in their hearts and in what they do on a day-to-day basis. With due respect, the officials of this government are certainly among those condemned by Jesus, our God and Savior, in Matthew 15:8, Mark 7:6 and in Isaiah 29:13.

Otherwise, if Aquino and his subalterns are really Christian believers–never mind what religion they may profess to have, if ever they have any religious affiliation at all–they could have imitated the example of Jesus who, being filled with compassion for the poor, proceeded to feed thousands with mere loaves of bread and tiny pieces of fish.

Aquino and his officials could not have missed these examples of Jesus, as they are expounded in church pulpits regularly. The Biblical verses citing these examples are Matthew 14 and Luke 9. If anything at all, these verses are telling the faithful to help the poor, especially those who are hungry and who have nothing to eat.

The real tragedy in all these is the fact that hunger and other woes arising from waterless farms, dry and arid land, and extremely hot temperatures, are not unannounced and sudden occurrences. The Aquino government knew this situation is not unexpected, considering the many information swirling around about global warming and climate change wrecking havoc in the Philippines.

It is clear that President Aquino and his officials chose to do nothing, and in their  usual style of procrastination or blaming past governments for every trouble that erupts in the country, they failed to come up with programs that will not only address the increasingly hot weather but those that will assist our countrymen severely affected by the aberrant weather.

Aquino as usual remained contented with sloganeering. As was his won’t during the last six years that he has been in office, he has been engaged in what is now derisively referred to as “noynoying”, or the inaction of a person even in the face of the gravest problem, hoping that the problem would simply solve itself away. What a president, what a curse!

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