THIS was a conclusion I reached eons ago, based on the Marcos campaign of 1986, the defeat of Ramon Mitra, Jr. in 1992, and that of Jose de Venecia in 1998. I recall hearing from people involved in the Marcos campaign that oodles of money was sent to ensure victory but many Marcos operatives, sensing which way the wind was blowing, simply pocketed the cash and abandoned the president. Mitra and de Venecia, too, suffered from the take the money and run syndrome suddenly afflicting their campaigns (one person who supported de Venecia told me that on election day, stacks and stacks of sample ballots remained in de Venecia’s house, his network not having bothered to get them distributed to voters). Still, whether in a presidential race (Ramos’ victory over Miriam Defensor Santiago) or the senate elections, dagdag-bawas seemed only useful in terms of close contests. The 2004 elections, however, led to allegations that dagdag-bawas had been perfected enough to answer the most notorious political question of contemporary times:

“Will I still lead by 1 million votes?”

How sophisticated? Late last year I talked to some loyalists of the late Fernando Poe, Jr. who’ve spent the time since 2004 doing a kind of forensic accounting of the elections. They said that the administration’s efforts were so complicated that it had taken them two years to even begin to understand how it was all done. The impression I got was that had the “Hello Garci” controversy not broken out, they would have had no way of even proving cheating had been done. I gathered from their remarks that the cheating, then, actually had two phases: the first phase was conducted so well, that it took them two years to figure it out; the second phase is what became notorious in 2005, and their claim is that it was due to the President panicking and ordering instant results, which Garci obligingly, but crudely, did. As one of them said to me, “the people who did the first phase of the cheating were all set to roll out their own second phase, but GMA couldn’t wait, and that’s where she got caught.”

According to the FPJ loyalists, this is how the sophisticated first phase went:

1. Massive disenfranchisement aimed at areas where the opposition would be strong.
2. In countless precincts, the actual results remained: for example, if GMA had won in a precinct, she still won, if FPJ won, he still won. But votes were subtracted and added so that when all the precincts were put together, the end result would shift a significant number of votes from FPJ to the President. This would alter provincial results so that, when the various provinces were canvassed in turn, known administration bailiwicks would compensate for known opposition bailiwicks.
3. No old trick was spared (vote-buying, intimidation, flying voters, spending public funds, etc.) but resources were fairly scientifically allocated to ensure wholesale, and not retail, manipulation.
4. In areas where public or media scrutiny could be controlled, namely, Mindanao, ghost precincts came into play. These represented pure bonuses: but this was the crude, Garci part.

Again, according to the FPJ people, the first phase, which involved Luzon and the Visayas, got derailed simply because the opposition vote proved massive (particularly Luzon, the votes of which equals the Visayas and Mindanao put together).

Now why have I brought up the 2004 elections? Because controversy concerning that election continues to haunt us. Public expectations of cheating are undeniable. And allegations are already being made: except they seem to focus on old, already-exposed tricks. But these allegations in media are no different from what W. Scott Thompson, in a commentary comparing Al Gore to cheating Filipino politicians in the Los Angeles Times in 2000, did: which was apply an old paradigm to a new problem. He suggested the term “dagdag-bawas” dates back  to (and might even have been coined by) Vice President Fernando Lopez in the 1969 elections, to point to what he expected (wrongly, it seems) to be the strategy of Al Gore in 2000.

This only shows where the past can only teach us so much: Thompson might have been on to something, but even as America (and the way cheating’s attempted there by whatever side) has discovered all sorts of new tricks, so too have cheaters here at home figured out how to cheat more effectively than their predecessors did in 1969.

Amando Doronila suggests that commentators have to question one piece of conventional wisdom: that the “command vote” is there, and is poised to be mobilized effectively by the administration. He says that yes, marching orders have been given, but it would be wrong to discount the possibility some races will lead to surprise results. Which in turns affects the dynamics the Palace wants to see emerging from this election.

Taking a cue, then, from Doronila. If dagdag-bawas came to be a household word in the 1990s, even the way it was carried out changed in the decade between the election of Ramos in 1992 and of Arroyo in 2004. And so, I wonder: what innovations will come into play this year? Will they be beyond the capacity of media and the public to detect? Or -and here’s a heretical thought- will we see a return to pure political muscle, to old-fashioned machine politics, and the setting aside of wholesale fraud?

Update (6:51 pm): it seems the good folks at Newbsreak might have just answered my question!

A strategist and two operators who claim to be involved in the administration’s “special operations” for the senatorial elections separately told Newsbreak that this year’s strategy adopts the “successful” aspects of the pre-election cheating that they said they conducted for President Arroyo in the 2004 elections, and avoids the parts that had been subsequently discovered.

Due to the sensitive nature of their disclosure, these sources refused to be identified. But they were among the sources we previously interviewed for our series of stories on election cheating in the 2004 presidential polls.

Specifically, they disclosed, what will not be repeated from the 2004 elections are:

* The use of pre-accomplished election returns (ERs) that were switched with genuine ones before the municipal canvassing began.
* The use of extra certificates of canvass (COCS) that tampered with actual provincial tallies.

The ones that will be repeated from the 2004 strategy, according to them, are:

* Wide-scale operations only in “friendly” cities and provinces.
* An unusually high voter turnout in these areas.
* The buying out, if necessary, of the opposition’s poll watchers.

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