EDITORIAL: The Supreme Court is in a Bind in The VP Contest

People don’t get it, especially fanatical followers of both Marcos and Robredo. The issue in the election protest is not who is the real winner in the vice-presidential race. The real issue is the credibility or dependability of our electoral system.

In this case the number of votes is the most critical issue – whether the original electoral votes of either of the parties will change during the manual counting. Any change from 1,000,000 to 1,000,001 either for the protestor or for the protested after the recount will indicate that the electronic Smartmatic machines cannot be trusted and therefore the election is a fraud.

The Supreme Court sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal has really a big task to do. It is not just to determine the real winner but to uphold the sanctity of the citizen’s votes, the bedrock and the very lifeblood of our democratic system. If the electoral process cannot be trusted via any single vote discrepancy, we either throw out the machines or nullify the elections. All the losers have now the valid reason to move for either of the two extreme options. Worst, people will have the reason to boycott future polls.

We are lucky that majority of Filipinos are still not radicalized to the point of making this issue a rallying point to join the destabilizers, or that the destabilizers have not been too credible as to entice people to their rants, or Filipinos are just too easy going and just lovers of jokes out of problems, or that at this point in time we just have a popular President that political issues like this are just taken as grains of salts and one of those things as long as he is the President.

We trust the wisdom of the non-political Supreme Court to prevent a democratic storm by their decision.

-RRB