Foreign-manipulated elections would be worse than no elections in 2019

HOUSE Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez on Wednesday raised the possibility of cancelling the 2019 midterm national and local elections. According to him, once the Constitution is amended to effect a change into a federal form of government, it will be subjected to a plebiscite, where the people will ratify the new constitution. One of the possible effects will be the cancellation of the 2019 national and local election.

What is new with this scenario? Nothing. At every election, without fail, the specter of a “noelection” scenario is brought up— either by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) insiders or by election pundits.

Comelec, in several instances in the past, claimed that it “had no more time” to procure a new automated election system (AES) and defended its direct contracting with Smartmatic, the Venezuelan election technology provider. Comelec threatens that there will be no elections if there is no election technology provider.

On the other hand, those op- posed to the Smartmatic’s counting machines continuously plays the same card of “no elections” if it will be Smartmatic once again. Yet, elections push through as scheduled. It did in 2010. Same in 2013 and 2016. It will continue in 2019.

Looking at it analytically, would it be better if we knew that there are no elections rather than not knowing who were the real “people The ghost of “Smartmatic-elected” haunt us – unless the nation stands up against the wholesale foreign outsourcing of our elections and the trampling of our sovereignty.

Mines and Geosciences Bureau letter

The Mines and Geosciences Bureau’s regional office in Eastern Visayas ( Region 8), sent a letter dated December 31, 2017, concerning my column of December 23, 2017 (“Smartmatic, not Urduja, killed the people in Biliran—Chong”). The letter was signed by Mr. Raul A. Laput, the OIC- Regional Director.

I am reproducing here a substantial portion of the MGB letter:

“Please be respectfully informed that as determined by the geologists of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB), Regional Post Geohazard Assessment in Biliran on December 28, 2017, it was not mining but rather the to have that [sic] contributed to the occurrence of landslides:

“1. Intensely weathered, fractured and altered volcanic rocks with clayey materials underlying the areas;

“2. Continuous heavy rainful [ sic] brought about by Typhoon Urduja which loosened the topsoil with boulders and uprooted the trees;

“3. Slope gradients of approximately more than 45 per- cent which is considered very high based on established MGB Landslide Susceptability [ sic] Rating parameter;

“4. Presence of points of weaknesses along roadcuts, riverbank portions and sloping mountainous areas; and

“5. Unstable grounds due to road development, farming and poor drainage systems.

“Meanwhile, it may be worth to mention that, during the conduct of the Post Geohazard Assessment on December 28, 2017, the MGBVIII Geologists have not came [sic] across any ongoing or remnants of previous open pit mining/quarrying activity within the vicinities of the landslide areas that may have contributed to such landslide occurrence. However, the landslides mostly occurred on vegetated areas where coconuts and fruit-bearing trees are present.”

Raul A. Laput (Signed)

SEC does it again, reader complains

Exactly a year ago I wrote on this column that, “The Philippines is still one of the worst places to start a business; main culprit is the SEC.” This elicited a letterreply from the Securities and Exchange Commission, signed by one of its directors.

Well, as they say, some things never change. On December 30, 2017, I received an e- mail inquiry from one of our readers. She included in her e- mail the online link to the January 7, 2017 column that I wrote. Here is a portion of that e-mail –

“Would you like to cover some more on the SEC?

“With the new system, nobody SEC. My lawyer tried to enter forms with the new SEC website. The site is down.

“There are constant delays and it’s ridiculous.

“Taking months to register a company name is a slap on the face on starting a company in the Philippines.

“I’m willing to arrange a journalist from your organization to go down to the SEC with my lawyer to see the ridiculous waiting times, broken SEC website, and impossible to fill electronic forms which reject anything you type in.”

On a subsequent e- mail, she sent me screenshot of a code snippet coming from

and commented, “You can image the incompetence of the person hard-coding data on a live site.”

checked out. She is a legitimate owner of a foreign-based information technology ( IT) firm. They have been trying to estab Philippines but hit snags because of the alleged ineptness of the SEC and its personnel.

Our reader knows what she is talking about when it comes to IT. I am sure she can put to shame the egregious people at the SEC.

Time for the SEC to reform itself and its processes.