Pimentel’s anti-cheating crusade

To a nation that watches elections as fervently as it watches basketball matches, the proclamation, four years late, of Aquilino Pimentel III as the 12th senator elected in the 2007 elections underscored the vulnerability of the manual voting and tabulation system used in that election year.

The Senate Electoral Tribunal  proclaimed Pimentel the winner last week after a recount showed that tens of thousands of ballots purportedly favoring Juan Miguel Zubiri were spurious. (Zubiri must have seen the curtain closing in front of him and beat the tribunal to the draw by resigning.)

Now, Senator Pimentel is trying to deal a stroke of poetic justice. He said he will focus on electoral reforms and would like to sit in the SET to make sure that people who manipulated past elections and plan to rig future ones will be punished.

With his empathy for those who may have been cheated out of office—and the electorate who may have been deprived of their chosen leader—the good senator will surely monitor the probe of poll fraud in 2004 and 2007 conducted by a five-man panel of the Justice Department and Commission on Elections.

The discredited former elections commissioner Virgilio Garcillano and former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo can keep quiet about fraud all they want.

But truth has a way of surfacing, as shown by the Pimentel case and former police colonel Rafael Santiago Jr’s word that he and a special force secured those who switched election returns at the Batasan after the 2004 polls.

Senator Pimentel and all those who care about the integrity of the ballot and hold sacred the voice of the people can pin their hopes on the indomitability of the truth.

They can also raise the bar on safeguarding the polls.

The neophyte senator plans to introduce measures that would hasten the resolution of poll protests. That’s a good starting point for his clean election crusade, since whatever improves our ability to correct errors is a weapon for justice.

Senator Pimentel, however, can train his eyes farther. Less than two years to the midterm elections, he may as well try to be a step ahead of high-tech poll riggers and call for a thorough examination of poll precinct machines—something that wasn’t done before the elections last year.

He should also investigate reports that there are groups being trained to conduct high-tech poll fraud.

Finally, Pimentel should stiffen laws and improve oversight of laws crafted against the cheating that happens long before and after  elections: When candidates-to-be take undue advantage by shamelessly campaigning early, hold back from spending for public service until days before election day, or drape walls with posters featuring their faces in wild abandon of limits on campaign paraphernalia.