Vote Fraud on Grand Scale Reflected in Manila Area

When election day came in the Manila area’s Makati district, whose residents favored presidential challenger Corazon Aquino, masked men fired M-16 rifles at cripples and nuns trying to guard the polls, other poll watchers were beaten and tens of thousands of voters found their names mysteriously removed from registration lists.

Five days later, government vote counters opened the gray steel boxes holding Makati’s final returns, and the true scale of the fraud became obvious to election watchdogs and observers.

What happened in Makati, as described by voters and poll watchers, represented just one more bit of evidence of how the forces of President Ferdinand E. Marcos tried to guarantee reelection for their candidate. The evidence that has piled up since election day includes photographs, videotapes, affidavits and altered ballots.

Government vote counters opening the Makati boxes early Wednesday discovered that election returns from four entire precincts had disappeared. That meant that more than 1,200 voters had been disenfranchised in the Feb. 7 election, the most crucial presidential poll in Philippine history.

896 Votes Missing

Had the results from Precincts 171, 184, 423-A and 432 arrived in Makati’s wood-paneled municipal council room, they said, presidential challenger Aquino would have had 896 more votes from an area where she enjoyed a better than 2-to-1 margin over incumbent Marcos.

But those missing ballots at least represented people who had managed to vote. In the eight days since the election, reports from voters and the National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL)--the volunteer poll-watchers’ group that spent election day at 80% of the country’s precincts--indicate that about 120,000 of Makati’s approximately 351,000 potential voters were unable to cast their ballots.

Last week, the focus was on the National Assembly, which counted the tally sheets before officially certifying Marcos to be the winner of the election. And the fate of the Makati tally sheets, and results from other districts around the nation, revealed the full scope of the electoral fraud.

‘Wholesale Fraud’

“On election day we were dealing with retail fraud,” said Ricardo Cardenas, a former Mobil Oil executive who spent the week in Makati City Hall heading a task force of volunteer poll watchers. “What’s going on now is wholesale fraud.”

When the voting was over and the provincial canvassers began their official tallies in Makati and throughout the country, election commission tally sheets from entire opposition precincts had disappeared. Nonexistent pro-Marcos precincts suddenly materialized--in some cases, entire ghost villages of tens of thousands of spectral Marcos voters had somehow cast ballots.

Makati is hardly alone. The vast district within the Manila metropolitan area--it encompasses the financial district, where sleek, high-rise offices mask the poverty of crumbling barrios nearby--is considered something of a political bellwether by reason of its social and economic diversity.

Makati is an important microcosm in another way: The election cheating there mirrored the tactics used in every Aquino stronghold in the Philippines--in her home province of Tarlac, in the key central Luzon provinces of Pampanga, Bulucan, Pangasinan and Batangas, as well as large cities like Cebu and Bacolod in the central Visayan region.

Blocked From Voting

In such opposition bailiwicks, poll watchers estimate, between 1.5 million and 3 million of the country’s total of 26 million eligible voters were kept from voting by the strategy of Marcos’ ruling party.

The aim was to keep down the Aquino vote. The opposition candidate had mounted the toughest challenge to Marcos in his 20 years in office. The Marcos regime, whose people control the voter registration rolls in most of the country’s 86,000 precincts, responded by identifying those precincts where the opposition vote had been high in parliamentary elections two years ago and then arbitrarily removing the names of dozens of voters from each of those districts.

Independent poll analysts here estimate that Marcos’ election machinery managed to cut Aquino’s final tally by at least 10%.

The fraud was all part of a strategy designed nearly two months ago, according to one top Marcos aide.

Over a drink last December, on the day that Aquino and running-mate Salvador Laurel announced their joint ticket, the Marcos aide said, “Well, that’s it. We’ll just have to keep her vote down.”

Learned From Tammany

Asked after the election about the plan to shave pro-Aquino names from the registration lists, the strategist confirmed that it had worked. “These are just typical election hi-jinks,” he said. “We learned it from your Tammany Hall.”

In many ways, Makati is the Tammany Hall of the Philippines. The diverse district is run with an iron hand by a mayor so tough that First Lady Imelda Marcos once called him “a tribal chief.” At election time in Makati, Mayor Nemesio Yabut always gets out the vote.

But this year, it wasn’t so easy.

Several weeks before the election, Marcos strategist J.V. Cruz, the Philippine ambassador to London, said the president’s campaign machine considered Manila and its 4 million votes the key to winning the election. And to win the city meant winning Makati or, at least, not losing it by an Aquino landslide.

It would take a concerted effort, the strategist added, a job for one such as Yabut, who, a Marcos loyalist once said, “makes (former Chicago Mayor Richard) Daley look like the Pope.”

As it did elsewhere, the chicanery began in Makati well before election day, when Marcos-controlled municipal and village officials revised the voters’ lists--and, it turned out, “lost” thousands of names in the process.

Jun Untalan, the opposition’s chief poll watcher for Makati, estimated that the disenfranchising cost Aquino 120,000 votes just in his district.

‘Every 10th Name Dropped’

“They copied the old lists by hand into new books, but every 10th name or so was dropped,” said Christian Monsod, general secretary of NAMFREL, who is compiling a comprehensive report on the electoral abuses. “It’s very hard to catch that.”

At every precinct in Makati, scores of voters, many carrying their registration cards, were refused ballots.

“I was registered, but they said my name wasn’t there,” said automobile mechanic Victoriano Lagera, 30. “What could I do? I went home.”

Hairdresser William Basagre, 24, arrived at his precinct to find the same problem--with a twist. His name was missing but there, listed at his address, was someone named Romeo Basagre. In a sworn affidavit, William Basagre said he had never heard of Romeo Basagre and charged that his ballot had been cast by a “flying voter,” a professional voter who casts ballots at several precincts.

Finally, after more than an hour of searching, local election officials said they had located William Basagre’s name. By then, however, it was five minutes after the polls had closed.

Vote Suspiciously Low

At the polling station where Lagera and Basagre--the real one--went to vote, the vote did go overwhelmingly for Aquino. But only 54% of 8,242 eligible and previously registered voters actually cast their ballots--a suspiciously low rate in a country where a turnout of more than 80% is the rule.

In other Makati polling stations, intimidation was used to keep the turnout down--and also forced some members of the independent poll-watchers’ group to abandon their posts, leaving the stations entirely under the control of Mayor Yabut’s handpicked election officials.

At the Guadalupe Nuevo Elementary School, which housed polling places for 84 precincts, the neighborhood chief of Marcos’ ruling party entered with a squad of armed men, pushing both the volunteer poll watchers and the opposition’s poll inspectors out.

It was here that at one point, the armed intruders fired their M-16 rifles in the direction of a delegation of nuns and wheelchair-bound paraplegics, who had posted themselves at the school as poll watchers because the national poll-watchers’ group considered it a “potential hot spot.”

‘Weren’t Really Nuns’

“We had to take action,” the ward boss, Ben Arcaiana, explained in an interview. “They were challenging all our voters. . . . Anyway, they weren’t really nuns; they were opposition women dressed up as nuns.”

In San Isidro, the volunteer poll watchers photographed ward boss Filemon Saromo as he was about to thrash one of their number with a steel chair. Twelve stitches were needed to close the resulting wound on Antonio Esteban Jr.’s leg.

Later, Esteban said the altercation began when he pointed out to Saromo that his presence inside the polling place was a violation of the election codes.

Saromo said the volunteers’ account was “a big lie.” He said the picture shows him merely removing the chair. In any case, the poll watchers fled.

At the Tejeros School, according to affidavits by several eyewitnesses--voters and NAMFREL poll watchers--armed men led by another ward boss went straight for the ballot boxes, emptying at least one of them into a gutter. Volunteers recovered the ballots, about 80 in all. They were all marked for Aquino. But it was too late; when the precinct’s tally sheets arrived at Makati City Hall, they reflected 80 votes--but for Marcos.

1984 Also in Dispute

Voting was only half the battle. Like many areas in the Philippines, Makati has a history of wholesale vote theft. Makati’s results from the 1984 National Assembly elections are still being challenged in the Philippine Supreme Court. The Feb. 7 ballots could not be stored in their usual place in City Hall because that room still contains the 1984 ballots.

So on election night, thousands of the volunteer poll watchers ringed City Hall and an annex building where 1986 ballots were to be stored, making sure that no ballot boxes were lost or went astray. They linked arms, lit candles, chanted the rosary and sang “Ave Maria” all night.

They stayed throughout last week, many of them missing work, meals and school to guard their ballots and the tally sheets on which the ballot count was recorded.

“Those ballots are our future,” said a young secretary in one of the human chains that formed each time officials brought in the ballot boxes containing the tally sheets.

Despite such precautions, when the tally sheets were unfolded at City Hall, 18 precinct tallies were missing. Fourteen of those later turned up, and most of them were set aside for investigation of possible tampering. But the other four were never recovered.

Opposition and NAMFREL copies of the original tally sheets showed that 896 of the missing votes had been for Aquino.

Opposition poll watcher Untalan charged that the missing returns were stolen, although he acknowledged that he had no hard evidence.

“Only God knows where they are now,” he said. “But precinct tallies do not simply disappear.”

May Be Set Aside

“We don’t know where they are,” acknowledged Ricardo Girnalda, the government-appointed Elections Commission chairman for Makati. “If we don’t find them, those precincts may be set aside”--meaning that they might not be counted in time for the official tally.

The problem showed up in reverse in some pro-Marcos areas outside of Manila. When the election was over in provinces such as Imelda Marcos’ home region, “new” precincts had mysteriously blossomed.

Facundo Roco, the independent poll watcher chief for southern Leyte province, said that, in one town, ballot boxes from seven precincts that no one ever heard of before were suddenly produced, all of them apparently stuffed with invented ballots.

“It was something like Houdini,” he said, laughing. “We put in 17 and out came 24.”

In Marcos’ stronghold, his home province of Ilocos del Norte, final unofficial returns gave the president 233,036 votes in the province to Aquino’s 1,696--or more than 99% for Marcos.

One of the international observers monitoring the election, John Hume, a Northern Ireland Catholic leader, quoted an opposition poll watcher in one of many Ilocos precincts that gave Aquino a zero vote as wondering aloud: “What happened to my ballot?”

Aquino Estimates 15%

In a press statement last week, Aquino charged that such chicanery, and the intimidation used by the ruling party, had cheated her out of 15% of her vote. In addition, independent poll watchers estimate that she lost another 10% to the government’s drive to turn away voters.

Last week, as the tally sheets with the results from each region were being counted in the National Assembly, Marcos continued to enjoy an unassailable advantage: His ruling party controls the parliamentary body by a two-thirds majority.

His supporters in the assembly shouted down opposition protests to statistically improbable returns showing him winning entire provinces with votes of 98% or 99%. The assembly Speaker who controls the canvassing had been Marcos’ national campaign manager.

“Our function is merely a mechanical one,” Speaker Nicanor Yniguez declared in laying down the ground rules for the final count by the assembly that decided the winner.

Yniguez ruled that no protests or appeals could be heard on final tallies from the provincial or city level until after the winner was proclaimed.

Instead, opposition assemblymen on a nine-member bipartisan board of tellers, on which Yniguez had the tie-breaking vote, were simply allowed to note their protests as a matter of record.

Lacked Seals, Signature

In one instance to which the opposition could do no more than register a protest, the final tallies from the southern island of Tawi Tawi arrived without proper seals and without the signature of the opposition poll inspector. The results gave Marcos 65,000 votes--a 6-to-1 margin over Aquino. Among those votes were 1,125, all for Marcos, from a town called Turtle Island, which has only 588 registered voters.

“Even the turtles voted,” said opposition leader Homobono Adaza, one of the assembly tellers.

In another example, the returns from the province of Lanao Del Sur on the island of Mindanao, which gave Marcos a similar margin of victory, contained what Adaza said were “1,500 ghost villages with ghost roads, ghost precincts and 90,000 ghost voters, all of whom voted for Marcos.”

Asked about the allegation, provincial Gov. Ali Dimaporo conceded: “There are many, too many villages, I know, and the voters too. But I inherited this from the previous governor, who was opposition.”

Panel to Hear Appeals

In each such case--there were more than 50 protests by the opposition in the first 58 provinces and cities canvassed Thursday--Speaker Yniguez said appeals would be heard by a nine-member appeals tribunal after proclamation of the winner. That tribunal is made up of six Marcos loyalists and three from the opposition.

There were also several protests raised by representatives of Marcos’ ruling party, all of them over results from regions where Aquino had won.

Marcos’ supporters have charged that fraud was committed by the Aquino campaign as well as by the independent poll watchers, most of whose volunteers found it difficult to hide their sympathy for the opposition. One member of the official U.S. observer team, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), said he found them blatantly partisan.

Said ward boss Arcaiana: “If we had people who couldn’t vote, it was because of (the poll watchers’) delaying tactics. They were challenging everybody, saying they were flying voters. Well, I say there’s no such thing as a flying voter.” But he offered no specific evidence to back up his charge.

Marcos Cited Videotape

Marcos himself told reporters last week that he had videotape of the poll watchers intimidating voters, and offered to show it. But his press office later failed to produce the proffered tape.

There have been other allegations against the poll watchers based on the support they have received from the Roman Catholic Church. Marcos loyalist Arturo Pacificador, the assemblyman who controls the central province of Antique, said the priests and nuns who were guarding the polling places “drove out all of my poll inspectors.”

Asked how clergy could frighten the lieutenants of a tough local boss who reportedly maintains a private army, Pacificador said: “They just intimidated them. They are priests and nuns. They have power over the people. My people don’t want to go to hell.”

The reaction to such charges from the poll-watchers’ group was predictable. Monsod, the group’s general secretary, simply pointed out that one of his poll watchers had been stabbed to death on election day, another had been shot while sitting on a ballot box, and 100 others had been seriously injured.