Noynoy victory hinges on Pinoys’ sense of history

Benigno Aquino III sat through an impromptu press conference when he was about to vote in his home province in Tarlac. There was a glitch in the machine and he had to wait, about four hours as it would turn out, before he could cast his ballot in the country’s first automated elections.

He himself had to put order in the confusion of reporters grabbing his attention, answering questions one at a time. Does he know of any incidents of cheating? Of vote buying? Of violence? For him it was just the beginning of the day. There had been no sign of any threats of putting the elections to waste. The other major candidates had done their thing of casting their ballots with no apparent major problem - the machines worked well although the lines were long and the heat was unbearable. Their body language spoke of their resignation (Gibo Teodoro), anger (Loren Legarda), dejection (Manny Villar), cautious and worry (Mar Roxas), confident and arrogant (Jejomar Binay), alone and superstitious (Joseph Estrada). Overall these were healthy features that democracy Philippine-style may be working again, and the fears that permeated through the public in the weeks leading up to the polls were all for naught, at least for now. One reporter asked Aquino why he came at nine o’clock (the precincts opened at 7a.m.), to which the leading presidential candidate answered casually, “kursunada ko." That’s how he wants it; there was no issue on the time, which would soon show that he was leading the votes in the presidential race. This scene was a far cry from the days of his mother, the late President Corazon Aquino, when she was running against the formidable machinery of a dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, in a snap election in 1986. It was then a fight between the forces of good and evil, a last chance of finding hope for a democracy with Cory Aquino leading the crusade. This time around the fears had to do with the machines, the Precinct Count Optical Scan or PCOS, pronounced pee-cos, the current byword in the election glossary. The fate of the country depended on this technology, also a massive leap from the days of manual counting, long anxious delays, the specter of violence in the waiting. It was these machines, if they didn’t work as in fact they did not in the sample testing just a week before the voting, that raised all the worst case scenarios in the fertile minds of a nation so used to uneven tactics, treachery, lies, schemes. When only about five per cent of the expected voters were trickling in by mid-morning, the fears of an election failure kept hovering; but by the end of the day, when the Commission on Elections (Comelec) extended the voting to an extra hour, three-fourths of about 50 million registered voters had made their voice count. There was a sense of calm and renewed excitement in Manila; in some neighborhoods the voting process was peaceful and went as planned, usually in places where municipalities had prepared their residents to go to their proper precincts. As seen on television, there were other cases of disorganized precincts, complaints of glitches and long queues, and of a few suffering from heat stroke. The Comelec says the incidents of violence were largely due to the fact that supporters of losing candidates could not resort to other means. On Tuesday, Philippine National Police Director General Jesus Verzosa said there was a 200-percent drop in poll-related violent incidents compared to elections in 2004 and 2007. People were told to be patient – this alone characterizes the Filipino psyche, to remind them that this was a historical event as well: the country is not just going high-tech, it is also exercising their choice for a new leader after nine years of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who has served the longest in office in the post-Marcos years. The cameras caught the outgoing president in a spontaneous reaction, showing a child-like relief after she fed her ballot and the machine worked in a jiffy. But it would be her manner in which she would transfer power to her successor that would spell the outcome of the elections and the future of politics. In some ways this whole exercise is also a repetition of the old: it is a battle among children of the elite political clans and the new rich who pandered their rags-to-riches story to appeal to the votes of the poor majority. The early counting for the Senate line-up appeared to be the mainstays as well, no new faces. One among them is the son of Marcos, to whom a generation of young Filipinos may not know or remember what the father stood for in the dark days of the past. His widow is well on her way to winning a seat in the Congress and the eldest daughter the governorship in their northern bailiwick of Ilocos Norte province. For a majority of the nation is also lacking in historical values – and this would take more than just new machines to change the entire dynamics of Philippine elections. – YA, GMANews.TV