Comelec officials in hot water

By Herbert Vego

HATS off to the “TnTrio”. Whatever it stands for, the moniker refers to three concerned citizens searching for the truth behind the 20 million votes that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) had counted within one hour after closing time of the May 9, 2022 election. They are Eliseo Rio, former secretary of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT); Augusto Lagman, a former Comelec commissioner; and Frank Ysaac, former president of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines.

All computer-savvy, the three had repeatedly asked the Comelec to release proof of transmission of the questionable 20 million votes but to no avail. They believe that the figures were rigged.

Rio, an electronic communication engineer, thinks its physically impossible because, at the close of voting at 7 p.m. on May 9, the 107,345 precincts nationwide had to complete nine steps before transmitting counts to the transparency server.

Citing the same reason, a fourth person – Col. Leonardo O. Odoño (Ret.) – has threatened to file Articles of Impeachment in Congress against chairman George Garcia and four other Comelec commissioners for culpable violation of the constitution.

In November 2022, Rio petitioned the Supreme Court to order Comelec to disclose the transmission logs, lest they be deleted. The SC gave the poll body ten working days from Feb. 28 to reply, but to no avail.

He alleged that the Comelec and its provider/operator of vote-counting machines, Smartmatic, had connived to mind-condition voters into accepting Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte as the leading presidential and vice-presidential contenders.

Even if a congressman comes up to initiate impeachment proceedings, the possibility of an impeachment case reaching the Senate is remote.

Even so, at least it would awaken the people out of lethargy and into demanding for reforms, as in kicking Smartmatic out of the country. The company is based in Venezuela.

As regards my two cents’ worth of opinion, one does not have to be a computer expert to realize that we have been “idiotized”.

Marcos himself, after losing to Robredo for vice-president in 2016 and losing his protest before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, denounced Smartmatic for “selling a system of cheating”. You may search the internet to retrieve the newspaper reports about it.

How then could Marcos have gained 31,104,175 votes against Leni Robredo in the 2022 presidential race? Robredo was not even half his score with only 14,822,051. What good had he done to outrun the woman who had clobbered him in the 2016 vice-presidential race and who had performed well in office?

How could then Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte have won the vice-presidency in 2022 with 31,561,948 votes against runner-up Kiko Pangilinan’s measly 9,232,883? Sara had never vied for a national office before.

Was there sense in Robin Padilla, an ex-convict newcomer, topping the senatorial race with 26,454,562 votes? Runner-up Loren Legarda, a multi-termer senator, was way behind with 23,992,761.

TWO FIRES IN TWO DAYS!

TOUGH luck! It’s not often that two fires in two neighboring barangays occur in two successive days. But it so happened it held true when barangays Rizal Lapuz Sur and Jalandoni Estate-Lapuz in Iloilo City caught fire in less than 24 hours last Friday and Saturday. The two fires burned 14 houses in Rizal Lapuz, 17 in Jalandoni Estate.

At the moment, the Bureau of Fire Prevention (BFP) could not yet trace the origins of both fires. But a radio report said that one of them resulted from an overheating electric fan.

I could not help but wonder why they happened in this Fire Prevention Month when we are supposed to be more cautious.

I recall that on that same day (Friday, March 17) in my column, I expressed satisfaction that the month had gone half-way with no major fire occurring in Iloilo City and cautioned against fire accidents resulting from power pilferage and illegal electrical connection.

I even quoted Engr. Arvin Celis, MORE Power’s manager of the system’s loss reduction program, who said that power pilferage and tapping a neighbor’s power line could cause massive fire.

“Each household has a predetermined load limit,” he said.  Hence, exceeding that limit, as in tapping a neighbor’s power line, could cause fire.

As an old song says, “When will we ever learn?”

BIG FISH CAUGHT IN ILOILO RIVER

ANGLERS enjoy the fun.  That’s the way we see these fishing hobbyists throwing hook, line and sinker atop bridges at the Iloilo River in Iloilo City.

But there was more fun when Jao Dela Llana hooked two big “bulgan” – one five kilos, the other 3.2 kilos. We spotted him proudly displaying them on the Facebook page of Mayor Jerry P. Treñas.

There could have been many others like him because the arm of the sea now throbs with fishes resulting from collaborative efforts between the city government and MORE Electric and Power Corp.

One recalls that twice in as many years, Mayor Treñas and MORE Power President Roel Z. Castro greeted their audience “fish be with you” while dropping off fingerlings in the river, proving that the arm of the sea had become clean enough for fish survival.

The mayor said that after he personally started funding the drive to repopulate fish at Iloilo River, private companies followed.  The biggest of them all is MORE Power, which let loose hundreds of fingerlings in February 2022, and again In February 2023 to celebrate its second and third year of operation as power-distribution utility in the city.

‘TSUG TSUG TSUG’ ROCKS BARANGAY AMERANG

THE residents and motorists passing by barangay Amerang in Cabatuan, Iloilo are mad at the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) for doing another destructive job. The long stretch of the concrete road is being bulldozed in order to be “reconstructed”.

I had driven through the same road smoothly many times before. But I could not see any need for that job. Do some people, aside from the favored contractor, stand to make a killing from it?

Why not spend the taxpayers’ money instead to concretize the “moonholed” rocky roads?

In fairness, however, hindi ka nag-iisa, bayang Cabatuan. The “tsug tsugging” of still good roads has become a normal phenomenon in the Philippines.