Administration senator Ralph Recto has a rather remarkable take on the steady rise in what are called, in police-speak, election-related violent incidents, or ERVIs.

On election day, in a telephone interview with senior reporter Gil Cabacungan Jr., he said:

“I believe that part of the reason for the violence is that some unscrupulous politicians were not prepared for the campaign and had to make up for the lost time because they thought there would be no elections this year.”

Say that again?

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THE PPCRV says there were the standard electoral woes: disfranchisement, electioneering and vote buying. But “beyond the usual,” I think most media people will be trying to come to grips with the staggering numbers elections -and trying to manipulate them- involves.

Just a while ago I did a little show-and-tell on GMA7’s election coverage, where I tried to tie together last Friday’s Newsbreak article on potential cheating strategies, with reports filtering in from the ground.

The first point involved a statement made earlier today by Comelec Chairman Benjamin Abalos, where he said turnout in some regions reached 85% or so (though an online report I saw quoted him as saying it was 70-80%). Inquirer publisher Isagani Yambot said his hunch was that it was closer to 70% nationwide (but that’s just a hunch). This figure is important because it’s the first nationwide figure people have, to compare their personal experience during election day, with what our officials claim actually took place. Prospero Pichay, who was a guest in a segment prior to mine, said he thought it was closer to 65%-70%, saying it’s a midterm election, and that the general turnout during such elections is law.

Not so. I pointed out that we can compare whatever turns out to be the voter’s turnout this year, with past years. A handout I received earlier that day from a group of statisticians (claiming the 2005 National Statistical Coordination Board Statistical Yearbook as their source) presented the following. It’s the percentage of registered voters, who actually voted in past elections:

May 2004: 81.4% actual voters
May 2001: 76.3% actual voters
May 1998: 86.4% actual voters
May 1995: 70.7% actual voters
May 1992:  75.5% actual voters

So 80% is believable, if we assume a high turnout for this election. Except I kept hearing during the coverage that reports from the ground kept mentioning low turnouts…

Either way, whether a low turnout or a high turnout nationwide, the next problem I brought up is something I blogged about earlier today. It’s the interesting figures the Inquirer.net Eleksyon 2007 Map brought out: large increases in registered voters in some areas, and a decrease in other areas, with the increases remarkably similar to administration bailiwick areas and the drop in generally-acknowledged opposition areas.

I hope more numerically-inclined people will crunch these numbers and see if my suspicions (my suspicions are, the map numbers combined with the Newsbreak article’s contents match, and remarkably so) have a basis.

But the main point is that for the average citizen, the election’s over. For many, many others, they’ve just begun. The first big sign of whether the pundits and analysts are on to something, will be the exit poll published around noontime tomorrow. The best line of the night came from Pichay: “well, the election’s over, and no one can change the results.”

Oh? The announced failure of election in parts of Mindanao just freed up a chunk -what is it, 60,000 votes?- that can swing the election for the bottom-ranking senatorial candidates.

I ended up voting for Alan Cayetano, even if his sometimes blithe simplifications almost always push me to reach for the remote. He can certainly talk, of that there is no doubt. But I sometimes get the impression that his tongue outraces, not only tact, but also thought. Perhaps he really does think in extremes, which will explain why he has no major legislation to show for after nine years in Congress. The Comelec’s failure to disqualify the fake Cayetano candidacy, however, finally convinced me of the merits of an argument I’ve heard again and again: a vote for Alan Cayetano would send a message to both Comelec and Malacanang. Play fair. So vote for Alan Cayetano I did. 

I did not vote for Chiz Escudero, although I had expected to. In the end (that is, this morning, when I wrote down my final list of senatorial candidates to vote for), I realized I could not shake off the sense that Escudero may well be the charismatic face, the articulate (if cloyingly repetitive) voice, of the Marcos restoration. He may have been too young in 1986, but I have no doubt about where he would have stood if he had been old enough to vote. As a responsible adult, however, he was on the wrong side of Edsa II — and on the wrong side of the Davide impeachment. That’s two strikes, in my book.

I also ended up voting for all three candidates of Kapatiran. I was ready to vote for Martin Bautista, having concerns about Zosimo Paredes’ position during the Nicole rape case and having actually met Adrian Sison in another newsroom many years ago. But I could not bring myself to vote for higher-profile candidates, including senators who had taken the trouble to sit me down for lunch and a dialogue. So I inserted Paredes and Sison into the last two slots, perhaps naively thinking I was sending a message of encouragement to men and women of good will.

Of the remaining eight slots, I chose two from Team Unity (I will vote for Joker Arroyo whichever side of the political divide he is on, because I believe we can still count on him to speak truth to power); five more from the Genuine Opposition (perhaps Loren Legarda will now seize the reins of opposition leadership from Joseph Estrada); and one independent.

How about you? Who did you vote for?

I did not, of course, change my mind about the possibility of a middle-class boycott. Perhaps I did not choose my words carefully enough, but all I really wanted to say was that I’ve started noticing some of the evidence (rather loosely defined) that Manolo must have seen too. Call it the Yellow Beetle principle; if say you’ve been grazed by a yellow Volkwagen, you will be amazed at the number of yellow Volkwagens you start noticing, crowding the city’s streets.

I don’t think I’ll ever reach a point, however, where I will bet against the Filipino’s readiness to vote in any or all elections. I have never thought that a boycott would work, not even when the argument for a boycott seemed to be strongest: in the 1981 mock presidential election, in the 1984 Batasan elections, or in the 1986 Snap Election.

If the latest SWS survey called it right, we can expect a high turnout, perhaps as much as 86 percent. A boycott of the middle-class would have to be massive to lower the turnout to, say, 70 percent. Even at 75 percent, it would be difficult to argue that a boycott did take place — or that it had an appreciable impact on the elections’ outcome.

One possible approach to measure the shape and size of a middle-class boycott may be to take a close look at Chiz Escudero’s final ranking. According to the SWS, classes ABC solidly support Escudero, while classes D and E are overwhelmingly for Loren Legarda. Escudero is headed for a Top 3, maybe even a Top 2 rank; if he ends up outside the top half of Senate winners, would this indicate that a large proportion of the middle class did in fact boycott the elections?

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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.”

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Ever since I disagreed with Manolo’s contention that the middle class will boycott Monday’s elections, I’ve started noticing indications that, well, he may be right. Strictly anecdotal evidence, of course, and certainly not massive enough to make me change my mind, but, well, consider only the following:

The son of an editor I know won’t bother to vote on May 14 — the same young man who, when he turned 18 a few years ago, stood in line for hours just to register as a voter.

Mike Tan’s always sensible column tomorrow (that is, it’s appearing Friday, May 11, although I read it on our system this afternoon) begins by talking about several people he knows who will skip Monday’s elections.

The dismal turnout among overseas voters — the vanguard of the rising middle class, is one way to look at them — suggests persuasively that the 2004 elections had turned them off the voting process.

To be sure, if I were a betting man, I would still place my money on participation, rather than a boycott. Our republic’s short history tells me that Filipinos, even the members of an increasingly impatient middle class, can’t resist the call of the polls.

In his blog Vincula, Atty. Teddy Te asks, “why vote”? His is a very eloquent entry:

Why vote indeed?

Because there must be hope. Because there is hope.

The hope that one vote and one’s vote–yours and mine–brings.

One’s vote and one vote makes the difference between light and darkness, the difference between being in chains once more and being truly free, the difference between whining in enforced silence and raising voices in just and righteous indignation, the difference between all that is good for this beautiful country and all that will lead us further on the road to perdition.

And of course, there are those, like columnist Honesto General, who is an old pro at voting and suggests it’s never as idealistic as Teddy Te might hope:

Looking back, my vote has seldom been based on ideology or partisanship. Voting has usually been a deeply personal act.

As Philippine Commentary puts it, this is the home stretch of the campaign. Some parts of the election seems a foregone conclusion, as Dean Jorge Bocobo reminds us, the first eight slots in the senate rankings indicate a lead comfortable enough to be cheat-proof. But a large number of senate slots are still up for grabs, and the only question is, what will decide it for the remaining five who will make it to the senate?

We can only hope, the voters will make the difference.

Doro (as Amando Doronila is called, by everyone who knows him) is back in Australia, working on the galleys of his memoirs, but he remains very much engaged in Philippine politics. Yesterday, in his Monday analysis for the Inquirer, he pointed out the obvious: The emperor has no clothes.

Next week’s midterm vote, in other words, is not a referendum on the Arroyo administration.

Others may still quarrel with him on this point; I myself would like to nuance the argument (”it is no longer a black-and-white referendum on the administration”). But he does have a point.

The campaign over the past three months has developed into one of the greatest non-issue elections since the republic’s creation in 1946.

Well, perhaps the mid-term elections of 1995 was more soporific, if we gauge public apathy or the lack of it. But it does seem to be true, yes, that this year “both sides have been talking past each other.”

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Reading Ang Kape ni Lattex, who pointed to the blog of his wife, it occurred to me: why isn’t crime more of an issue in the elections? His wife, in Take You There, talks about her experience with the “bubblegum gang”:

…Then, the guy on my left also pointed out the bubble gum on my hair. I was getting angry then and distracted and I believe that’s the time, the guy on my left took my wallet and cellphone. Nasigawan ko pa yung naglagay ng bubble gum sa buhok ko. Things happened so fast. They suddenly all went down the bus at Magallanes before the overpass. I only realized that my wallet and cellphone was taken when I checked my bag when we were at Evangelista St. They were good cause my bag didn’t have any slit. There I lost my wallet with my ATM, Jonjon’s credit card, SSS ID, Community Tax Certificate and my phone with lots of contact numbers on it.

Now almost everyone, I think, sooner or later has a similar story to tell. Regardless of what kind of crime story it is: side view mirrors being stolen, bags being snatched, cellphones being stolen, taxicabs held up, jeepney passengers held up, etc., etc.

And again: why hasn’t it become a campaign issue?

Why am I not surprised? It turns out Gingoog Mayor Ruthie Guingona, the wife of opposition leader Tito Guingona, is supporting the administration coalition’s Team Unity.

She said she needed the administration’s support, and revealed that her husband was, well, okay with the arrangement. (In her words: “OK lang sa kanya.”)

Ah, yes. I’m afraid once a statesman’s inner traditional politician has successfully struggled to come out (as an Inquirer editorial once formulated the elder Guingona’s dilemma), there really is no going back.

In 2004, the opposition candidate in Bukidnon’s second congressional district, someone long allied with Joseph Estrada, found himself out in the cold, when Fernando Poe Jr. brought Guingona, a friend and mentor of his running mate Loren Legarda, into the opposition coalition. The price of that new “frigid temporary alliance of convenience” (to quote Guingona’s son’s own fulsome phrase): FPJ’s support for the younger Guingona’s candidacy for congressman in the same district.

So far, so traditional.