BALLOT boxes get a fresh coat of paint in time for the May 14, 2007 elections. [photo by Joe Galvez]

IF THE likes of Casiple are to be believed, it's quite a structure, and includes an extensive network of document and signature forgers, as well as access to official materials and equipment.

Last year, for instance, Arsenio Rasalan, a self-confessed vote-rigger, pointed to former Comelec director and election lawyer Roque Bello as being instrumental in the forging of election documents in 2004. In his affidavit, Rasalan said that Bello headed a complex operation to fabricate 10,000 election returns (ERs) and replace them for the ones being kept at the Batasang Pambansa.

Bello denied the allegations. The Comelec, for its part, never conducted any investigation into the matter.

More recently, the opposition through election lawyer Sixto Brillantes Jr., claimed that the security of the printing of ERs and COCs has been compromised with the involvement of a private printer alleged to have colluded with fraudsters to produce spurious ERs and certificates of canvass (COCs).

The memorandum of agreement between the Comelec and the National Printing Office (NPO) stipulates that the printing of election regulated documents — ballots, COCs, ERs, statements of votes (SOVs) — will not in any way be subcontracted to private printers. Yet the Comelec allowed the NPO to lease printing machines owned by National Grand C Graphics, Inc., the same private printer believed to have been part of the alleged 2004 election fraud involving fabricated election forms, to print the election returns. Grand C Graphics personnel were also seen supervising the actual printing of ERs at the government printing office.

In two letters sent to the Comelec, Brillantes raised the opposition's apprehension that Grand C Graphics personnel contracted by the NPO may have been privy to the security and other control features incorporated or embedded in the ERs and ballots. He also underscored the lack of any bidding process that led to the award of a lease or contract to Grand C Graphics.

But Commissioner Resurreccion Borra, the commissioner in charge for printing of election documents, dismisses Brillantes's concerns as "rehashed issues." He says that the NPO did not enter into any subcontracting arrangement but merely leased Grand C Graphics machines to augment NPO's printing capacity.

"Of course, when you lease your equipment, you bring your own personnel," says Borra, citing the need to ensure the smooth operation of the machines.

Casiple, taking note of this access by printing employees to the plate, design specifications or finished product, the NPO printing process and the serial numbers, asks, "Who's to prevent anyone from printing his or her own election documents?" He says with such an access it becomes a simple matter of affixing forged signatures to these fabricated ERs — using the same paper with the appropriate watermarks and security marks and following the layout and numbering of authentic election forms — as was supposedly done by the so-called "golden hands" in the 2004 elections.

He also says that the vigilance to ensure security in the printing of election documents may have already been a tad late as nobody does monitoring of the importation of security paper done way before the elections.

"When the imported security paper goes to the cutting machines of contracted printers to be cut to the size required of election documents, it generates excess," explains Casiple. "The Comelec does not supervise this process." He believes the documents used in dagdag-bawas operations in previous elections came from this excess.

EXCESS IS also the name of the game when it comes to the national voters' list, say election officers and civil-society groups. This, despite a Comelec announcement that it had purged from the list more than a million names corresponding to double registrants, deactivated and dead voters, and those who have transferred residence.

	EVIDENCE of fraud during the 2004 elections in Muslim Mindanao was too significant to ignore. [PCIJ file photo]

In San Juan, Comelec election officer Liza Torres says she was surprised to find the names of deactivated voters — those who have not voted in the last two elections — still on the final list generated by the Comelec's information technology department. She says that since there is not enough time to correct the errors, the names have just been manually crossed out on the list to indicate that these voters cannot be allowed to vote on May 14.

In Cainta and Taytay, Rizal, volunteers of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) reported finding 2,357 double registrants out of 24, 297 voters within four polling centers and 120 polling precincts covered jurisdictionally by the San Lorenzo Ruiz Parish of the two municipalities. Double registrants numbering 353 were also found in Arienda Elementary School in Cainta and Tapayan Elementary School in West Floodway Taytay.

Austri Basinillo, PPCRV chair of San Lorenzo Ruiz Parish, says they were able to identify the double registrants by running an intensive search using FileMaker Pro, a cross-platform database application, through the electronic list of voters (converted into a spreadsheet file from a 2,500-page Word document) given to PPCRV by the Taytay Comelec office. He also relates how they confronted some of the double registrants, who admitted they were herded by their barangay officials to register more than once.

Basinillo says that in addition, their FileMaker Pro search uncovered cases of multiple listing (sometimes involving three names), fathers and sons having the same birth dates, and also birth years dating back to 1900. "Those born in 1900 are probably dead by now," he says. "If the voters' list has already been cleansed, how come their names still appear on the list?"

In ARMM, Dalidig likewise disputes claims that the voters' list in the region has been cleansed, disclosing that a fraudulent voter registration process resulted in an increase in the number of registered voters by more than 100,000.

Observers estimate that the "padding" of the national voters' list may run up to as much as six million voters. Casiple says this number translates to 35,000 fake voters per district. "With 200 congressional districts," he says, "this means that 36 precincts per town are ghost precincts."

Some reports say the reason for the continued appearance of double registrants, dead and deactivated voters in the list is because the cleaned-up version went up in flames during the fire that gutted the old Comelec building last March. But the Comelec itself denies this — and is adamant that the voters' list is now clean.