The strained credibility of the Philippine presidential election was battered late Sunday and early Monday by new allegations of fraud from government employees who walked off their jobs counting the vote returns.
Thirty computer operators working with the government Commission on Elections (COMELEC) said they walked out of the national vote-counting center in a convention hall alongside Manila Bay because their returns were being manipulated.
”We just felt we had to do something,” one of the operators said after the group was taken to a church where some of its members met with reporters. The 30 workers represented slightly more than half of the night shift staff at the computer center.
The walkout came with President Ferdinand Marcos and challenger Corazon Aquino locked in a dramatically close race.
Returns from Friday`s election were emerging at a painfully slow pace and were expected to dry up completely late Monday when the national parliament convened to begin the 15-day process of inspecting the vote returns and declaring a winner.
By Monday morning, the government count gave Marcos 3,056,236 votes to Aquino`s 2,903,348, with 28 percent of the precincts tallied. The unofficial count by the National Citizens` Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) showed Aquino leading 5,864,099 to 5,156,685, with about half percent of the precincts counted.
Members of a U.S. delegation sent to the Philippines by President Reagan to monitor the elections said they were aware of the computer operators`
walkout, but had deliberately avoided meeting the protesters. One member of the White House delegation said privately that the walkout was ”damning.”
He said he found it hard to believe a credible winner could emerge in the surprisingly close election.
Publicly, the 20-member U.S. delegation echoed the findings of a separate 44-member international observer team, which said Sunday night it had found evidence of fraud in the election.
While the U.S. delegation pointedly avoided making any mention of the word fraud or drawing any conclusions about the fairness of the election, its members did issue a joint statement saying they had ”witnessed and heard disturbing reports of efforts to undermine the integrity of (the electoral)
process.”
”Even within the last 24 hours, serious charges have been made in regard to the tabulation system,” the U.S. group said, pointedly referring to the walkout by computer operators.
Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) said he and other members of the U.S. delegation had met with church officials who sheltered the computer operators after the walkout.
”We concluded that it would be better for us to not to discuss directly with the workers themselves before or after so as to not give anybody the impression or the ability to say we were intervening in a way in which we should not be,” Kerry said.
The delegation, headed by Sen. Richard Lugar (R., Ind.), left Manila Monday morning for the United States to prepare a formal report on the election and submit it to Reagan.
Before leaving, Lugar said he found it impossible to describe the election as ”clean.”
Kerry said the walkout by the computer operators could be particularly significant.
”It is clearly something that ought to be investigated,” he said. ”It is at the core, at the very core, of what judgment can be made of this election.”
One of the young computer operators who met with reporters in a church after the walkout said government officials were juggling figures.
”We have walked out purely for professional reasons,” the operator said. ”At the beginning of the job, we were made to believe that this was going to be a professional job. Now we feel that we have been used.”
The operators said their count showed Aquino running ahead of Marcos.
Government television and radio repeatedly warned listeners to ignore vote totals–even those announced on government television and radio–because only the national parliament could declare a winner in the presidential race. Parliament was scheduled to reconvene Monday after a two-month recess and one of its first orders of business was to begin the 15-day process of tabulating the official vote count.
No matter how that vote count turns out, there are bound to be serious criticisms of the system.
Marcos` ruling party, the New Society Movement, claimed it would have won a landslide victory if the Catholic Church, the United States government and a horde of foreign reporters hadn`t interfered.
Commentators on government television accused nuns and priests of stealing votes across the nation on election day and repeatedly blamed every evil in Filipino society on the presence of the ”evil Western press.”
