Look at its supposed quick count. It is even slower than what we would get if media added up and reported the official counts of the various provincial and city board of canvassers.

One has to suspect – if there will be massive manipulation of the results – that Comelec is doing a job for Gloria Arroyo. I personally believe, however. that this president in the last election under her watch would rather lose than cheat. If there was cheating in 2004, it could even be forgivable. After all, she was a candidate (despite an earlier promise that in the commitment to having clean elections she would not run) and probably, as a lot of the elite and many of the Comelec commissioners must have believed, that they were saving the country from the movie actor who might have won if they had not cheated.

But what is wrong with reporting data gathered from the election precincts, provincial board of canvassers and the Commission on Elections? If one gets any data from any of these and puts them all together, how can that be false reporting?

But let us give the Comelec the benefit of the doubt – which could actually be the root of all our problems about our elections (that we still give the cheaters the benefit of the doubt) – and see how the count goes from here. If today and tomorrow, Team Unity begins to report 12-0-0 results all over, then, that it is. The fix is in and there is no one to report the contrary facts and the cheating that the administration and the Comelec have foisted on us.

***

That senatorial candidate Alan Peter Cayetano has gotten a raw deal from both the Comelec and the Supreme Court is beyond question.

The Comelec, by fudging on its decision on the disqualification of a Cayetano namesake as nuisance candidate, will be responsible for the disenfranchisement of maybe as much as three million voters whose votes for "Cayetano" or "Peter" or "Peter Cayetano" will not be counted. The Comelec decided, finally (after hearing the case for three whole months), on the weekend before the election that the namesake was definitely nuisance candidate but that – blah, blah – the decision would take effect on May 15, the day after elections and that, therefore, the votes for "Cayetano" and "Peter" or "Peter Cayetano" would be considered as stray votes.

A radio commentator likened this to a decision to buy fodder for a starving horse with a proviso added that the grass would be purchased only after the prize horse had died. How true!

Clearly, the Comelec wished on Alan Peter Cayetano all the evil that they could conjure. Why did the Comelec do this? In an earlier column, I noted that it was not a good idea for someone who would become a candidate to create for himself enemies of powerful persons. This is the upshot of Alan Peter’s making an enemy of someone who obviously can tell the Comelec what evil he wants to happen to Alan Peter Cayetano.

The present composition of the Comelec is disappointing. It cannot be trusted to do what is right.

***

Here is a text message from an aunt of candidate Loren Legarda: "Read your column. Don’t you think there is method in their madness? 1.126 voters in our barangay 13 in Pasay were not allowed to vote. Many of us have lived here for over 40 years but were disenfranchised because a certain Armando Villegas, a pedicab driver, who is not even from our district (he is from Malibay) claimed we were flying voters. What is really the outrage is how a certain Judge Gina Bibat Palamos readily gave credence to this absurdity. But since our barangay is an opposition bailiwick, you can put two and two together. It angers me when Abalos dismisses the exclusion of 100,000 voters as minimal compared to a million in the past election. We are not statistics. We are citizens who were deprived of their right to suffrage."

***

Do you think that the present Comelec cares about your being deprived of your right to vote especially that, anyway, you probably would have voted for the candidates of the Genuine Opposition and maybe even against the hand-picked candidates of Malacañang for Pasay mayor and Pasay congressman?

***

An event that is now on its 16th year and which ought to be given some recognition by the Department of Tourism is the 16th Oasis Paco Park Hotel Classic. The Park Classic is a golf tournament that runs twice a year and which brings in just about a hundred tourists a year just for four days of golf and the attendant merry-making that goes with fun golf games.

The invited guests who are invited come from Europe, Australia, Guam, Canada and the USA. This year’s first tournament (the next will be in October) will start at Canlubang on Monday, May 19 and end on Thursday after going through three other courses (Sta. Elena and Forest Hills among them). Locals are also welcome to join.

The players are not world-beaters (although some of them are pretty good) and are only tourists but the fact that a boutique hotel (less than 50 rooms) like the Oasis Park at Belen and Romualdez streets in Paco, Manila can bring in tourists to play golf on our golf courses is the sort of effort that the DOT ought to encourage. That this is the 16th year that the hotel has been doing this is commendable.