By Volt Contreras, Nikko Dizon
Inquirer
Last updated 06:49pm (Mla time) 05/24/2007
MANILA, Philippines–In some areas in Muslim Mindanao, local chiefs could issue orders for ballots to be filled up in behalf of entire villages for political kingpins offering the highest bid.
The voters, meanwhile, would either be too scared to protest, too clannish to question their conspiring elders, or just too detached from the government to feel violated as citizens.
Exploit this Moro “culture” using poll-rigging machinations devised by the “Christian North,” and that might help explain why the South has historically been known as the main theater of fraud in Philippine elections.
A veteran election official, a poll watchdog and a Muslim reform advocate shared these views as reports of massive vote-buying, cheating, and violence in the May 14 elections have again emerged from at least two Southern provinces, Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao.
One poll watching official has become so wary of Lanao Sur’s notoriety, that he warned the Commission on Elections that holding special elections there this Saturday would give cheaters exactly the chance they wanted. (The special elections were called after the presence of armed forced disrupted polling in 13 towns in the province.)
The 100,000-plus votes up for grabs in the province, likely the last that will be canvassed, could spell victory or defeat for senatorial candidates fighting for the last three to four slots in the Magic 12, Bantay Eleksyon 2007 chair Ramon Casiple noted.
The special elections “precisely puts the province in a position to determine the last members of the Magic 12, and you can expect anyone in danger of falling out of the Magic 12 to be there” in Lanao, Casiple said.
He said any financier of vote-buying in Mindanao would cut deals primarily with the leaders of the dominant clan in a target area — and that clan pretty much extended to the mayors, the local police, the election inspectors, and the canvassers.
Clan elders can then set the “price” per vote according to the highest bidder, he said.
“It’s a moving target,” Casiple said. If the race goes neck and neck near the end of the canvassing, for example, a senatorial candidate hanging on at No. 13 may place a “bid” of P10,000 per vote but a lower-ranking bet may come up with a better offer of P25,000 per vote.
Election-rigging schemes, however, are mainly hatched in Manila and carried out by “operators” who only flock to Mindanao during election seasons, according to former Comelec Commissioner Mehol Sadain.
“It is wrong to say outright that cheating is done by Muslims; the operators from the Christian North are the ones who exploit the people’s ignorance, complacency and apathy,” said Sadain, a commissioner formerly in charge of Region IX.
“Ever since,” he conceded, “elections in Muslim provinces have been problematic because the people still do not have a real appreciation of the right to suffrage under a Western (-modelled) Constitution.”
There is also that element of “distrust” that can be traced back to when Moros fiercely resisted Spanish and American colonizers, both of whom employed native Christian troops to invade Muslim bastions, according to Sadain.
For these segments of the Moro populace, “lineage” — not democratic exercises like elections — is still the prevailing principle for choosing leaders.
“They just would not care and voting for them is something mechanical that they just have to do, and it’s their lack of interest that makes it possible for the leaders and operators to ‘substitute’ their vote,” he said.
This can also help explain why the mostly Christian poll watching groups have found it difficult to penetrate Moro communities with voters’ education campaigns or find whistleblowers among the voters, he said.
And the few citizens duty-bound to question such conduct of elections — or actually the lack of it — were often met with a drawn gun or offered cash in exchange for their silence, Sadain said.
In a local election held in Basilan in 2005, for instance, teachers manning polling precincts in one school could only watch in terror as “15 barangay chairmen” barged in, “filled up all the ballots themselves,” then stuffed these in ballot boxes, he recalled.
In such situations, “fear is something you cannot just solve by holding automated elections,” Sadain wryly noted.
“It will really take a basic change in culture and values,” said Casiple said.
Muslim scholar Taja Basman conducted a study on how his native Lanao del Sur has gone down in history as the place “where the birds and the bees also vote” and where “children as young as 12 and 13 years old are registered by their parents in exchange for P1,000.”
The people’s extreme poverty would overcome any moral scruples about accepting money in exchange for their votes, while lack of infrastructure effectively kept elections out of Comelec control especially in the hinterlands, he said.
But immediate solutions — or deterrents in time for future elections — can be put in place, said Basman, president of the Philippine Islamic Center for Moderate Muslims and of the Mindanao Research Institute.
He suggested that elections be held in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao ahead of the rest of the country, the way it is done for overseas and local absentee voters.
A purge of shady election officials in the local level can also be initiated by focusing the so-called “lifestyle check” on these individuals after an election, Basman said.
But then, he said, real change and empowerment may still need to start from the voters themselves: Taught for generations to believe that “might is right” and be subservient to their powerful leaders, “hopefully one day they will come to their senses.”
