By Edgar Escultura – Electronic cheating really started with the snap Presidential Election of 1985 between Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Cory Aquino.
The evidence: at the middle of the counting of votes, the electronic technicians who were in charge of the tally board of the Commission on Elections noticed that the votes exceeded by 20 million the 43 million registered voters and Marcos was in the lead.
At that point, the technicians walked out, the counting stopped and then Secretary of National Defense and architect of Martial Law, Juan Ponce Enrile, feeling people power all over the place, confessed that there was massive cheating and pleaded to Cardinal Sin for help as he was going to be arrested.
Then people power took over until the US took Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and his party to safety and Cory Aquino became President.
In that election, the results from the provinces were fed into another set of machines in Laguna for transmission to the Commission on Elections. Until today, no one has explained why those transit machines were needed. What we know is there was addition of fake votes and the likely culprit was the set of transit machines.
The method was quite crude then: simple addition. But during the senatorial elections of 2018, the method was refined: distribution of votes to administration candidates. Indeed, all of them won despite the peerless slate of Ocho Derecho candidates! That was a dress rehearsal for the 2022 presidential elections where all the administration candidates except one opposition candidate won.
Another evidence that the cheating took place in the transit machines is the fact that Leni and Kiko won overseas where the votes reached Manila through diplomatic channels. The Commission on Elections was a party to the cheating by failing to have the machines inspected by an expert as required by law and allowing BBM to run despite his conviction for tax evasion.
It may take a mass movement and a broad united front to take out the obstacles to fair and honest elections which include, aside from cheating, distortion of history and fake news and stories.