Expelling banshees

Ever kick a mound of white ants? “Anay” or termites spill out helter-skelter. That’s today’s image of the country’s “ghost voting capital” ---after President Benigno Aquino shredded the Autonomous Region of Muslin Mindanao’s notorious “Book of Voters.”

Heeding Congress Joint Resolution 3, the President ordered registration of voters, starting from A. The rewrite covers provinces of Basilan, Sulu, Tawi-tawi, Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur, plus cities of Marawi and Lamitan.

Joint Resolution 3 has widespread ramifications. Some electors are spooks or , double sometimes triple. registrants. They constitute the so-called ‘command votes’ or ‘controlled votes’. Wielded by political warlords, they can tip local as well national elections.

In Marawi City, “30 non-Maranao students of Mindanao State University were (directed) to assume Maranao names and register,” Inquirer reported. Flying registrants assumed names of dead and ghost voters...( They poured in ) from Davao, the Zamboanga Peninsula, Lanao del Norte, Iligan and Maguindanao

“In Datu Saudi Ampatuan town, the registrant looked all of 13 or 14, Carol Arguillas of MindaNews observed. But she claimed to be 19. “You’re in college?,” we asked . She shook her head. “High school?” No? “ Grade Six?” she replied, almost in a whisper. “When did you start going to school?” The girl kept silent. “When will you turn 20?” Di ko alam.

When registration ended July 18, about 1.3 million applied for inclusion, Commission on Elections Sixto Brillantes estimated That’s lower than the 1.7 million crammed in the nullified’ registry.

Over 50,000 minors were nailed trying to bore their way into the new lists, Their names were segregated, Brillantes added.. They’ll be re-examined in biometric verification process in the days ahead. In Lanao del Sur, Reform, an NGO --ARMM Now -- counted 17 percent less than the 522,417 listed in scrapped lists.

ARMM’s population stood at 4.1 million in 2007. But a 2010 revalidation, by National Statistics Office, found population a fraction of “more than 3.3 million. Elsewhere, the country posted population growth at 1.8 percent. Not ARMM. It claimed population growth of 5.4 percent.

Registrered votes, in the National Capital Region, dipped by 4 percent in 2007. In contrast, ARRM’s bolted. Is this statistically possible?” Asian Development Bank statistician Dalisay Daligmalig asked equally skeptical fellow scientists at an earlier Philippine Population Conference.

Of course not, Demographer Mercedes Concepcion wrote. ARRM analysis must be separate. Still, this “impossibility” jacked up Lanao del Sur’s voting population by a staggering 16 percent. Sulu leaped by 12 percent and Basilan by 8 percent. Maguindanao swept the field by claiming 78 percent!.

Padded registration lists enabled Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s candidates to shut out the opposition 12-0 in Maguindanao’s mid-decade elections. Only four years later years did Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel manage to get his rightful Senate seat.

Hindi tayo nag-iisa. Look at Zimbabwe.’s registration list. Almost “27 percent of names appearing on the register were of dead people”, notes the South Africa-based Institute of Security Studies. In dictator Robert Mugabe’s rural home district of Zvimba there were 1,101 voters who were 110 years of age. Most were born on the same date.

Overall, Mugabe tacked on 3 million phantoms to the list. “Zimbabwe’s voter’s roll is beyond redemption,” ISS said. “ It) cannot even be used as one of the building blocks in construction of a new voters’ roll. It simply has to be scrapped completely”.

In the US, Pew Center found almost two million deceased Americans still on voter rolls. And 2.75 million people are registered to vote in more than one state. But only about three-quarters of the eligible population is registered.

The findings do not suggest fraud, explained director of Pew's Election Initiatives, David Becker. But registration systems, in many states, enter vast quantities of data by hand. “These methods are costly, error-ridden, and inefficient as they are quaint”.

It costs the U.S. 12 times more to maintain a voter list than Canada,” he added. By innovative technology and data-matching methods, Canada registers 93 percent of eligible population.

ARRM is haunted by phantom students, wraith-teachers “even ghost schools in ghost barangays”, says Jamar Kulayan, who was appointed January. A Tausug, Kulayan found it had become practice, in the region, for teachers to bloat student-enrollee numbers.

There are 2,000 teachers in excess of 20,000 officially hired. “Names of teachers already dead, retired, or abroad were still listed". They and continue drawing their salaries. A “Task Force on Moratorium of Abolition and Creation of Schools” is now operational.

. The new final Book of Voters is still ahead. But a consensus on making honest elections the centerpiece of ARMM reforms exists, notes Institute for Autonomy and Governance’s Fr. Eliseo Mercado, OMI... The new technology of biometrics will be used to ensure honest polls.

If this drill succeeds, it’d be a fitting legacy for P-Noy, new ARRM officials and NGOs working to purge lists.. Exorcising banshees is a welcome change.*

( Note: Sorry for skipping a few issues. Whacked my back trying to pick up something. Forgot this was three decades later. Or was it four? --- JLM. )

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