Recount?

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With Rene Sarmiento raising the white flag over at Lanao and certain other places in Mindanao, we are now left with no one who may seem trustworthy enough to carry out this troublesome election. Ricky Carandang’s report about blank ERs being placed in a hotel instead of putting them in the municipal treasurer’s office in Marawi is causing Sarmiento to lose face and, not to mention, his integrity. But to his defense, the Commissioner said that the blank ERs were being transferred in the hotel because there was no municipal treasurer to receive the forms. He even had his staff sleep side by side with the ERs to ensure that they won’t get lost.

Lacson, Binay and a whole bunch of people are questioning Sarmiento’s resolve as Head of Task Force Maguindanao. Despite having the Comelec’s most trusted man on the toughest job this election, reports about electoral fraud are still surfacing. In the end, putting someone like Sarmiento didn’t stop the cheating. Many still are puzzled by his sudden resignation on his post. Was he pressured to “stop doing the right thing?” Because if you listen to anyone on the news, every single one of them doesn’t buy him being sick enough to leave his job. To me, if anyone wants to know if he’s sick or not, have him go through a medical check up and wait for his results. By then, if and only if he is indeed telling the truth, everyone could shut up. But the thing is, his resignation is untimely, or rather mysterious and odd.

But then again, even good people get weighed down every once in a while. Look at Joker Arroyo for instance. Since teaming up with TU and the pathetic unano Commander in Chief, he’s become silent and stale. Has anything worthwhile come out of his mouth lately? Has he stood up for anything that treads on human rights and the Constitution? Has he practiced his tagline, “’Pag bad ka lagot!” on someone bad? He hasn’t done anything and that’s quite disappointing. With Sarmiento, his giving up signals more than just disappointment and sadness; it signals that cheating can resume. Well, not that it stopped while he headed the Task Force Maguindanao.

Seeing as everyone in the whole country is disillusioned over the non-stop bickering of TU and GO, it makes me wonder how the international community must feel and think about us after being here and seeing firsthand how we conduct our silly elections. Cheating is so widespread here that when an international observer commented about it being outrageous, Bunye said that the observer “doesn’t know enough of our country to comment on something like that.” What an insulting thing say about us Pinoys. What does Bunye want to say, that cheating in elections here has always been practiced and well-accepted that foreigners need not worry about it? Is he saying that we are a culture of cheats? Disgusting really, but expected since he serves under the Godmother of all cheats in this country.

Anyway, TU wants a recount. On the other hand, GO wants to disregard the votes from Maguindanao. With all of these delaying tactics around, how will we ever know who’ll sit in the Senate? As I’ve said here before, no one will back down because they know they’ve been cheated. If we take out cheating in the whole election process, and stay honest about running and garnering votes, then counting and tallying won’t take this freaking long.

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Filed under 2007 midterm elections, TU, ben abalos, comelec phunk, lintang bedol, politica et.al