(Following is the transcript of the segment “Analysis by Winnie Monsod” which aired on News on Q on Feb. 22, 2010. Prof. Winnie Monsod is the resident analyst of News on Q which airs weeknights at 9:30 p.m. on Q Channel 11.)

Let’s take a closer look at two of the cases, involving the provinces of Isabela and Pampanga.Who were in effect found to have cheated? Grace Padaca in Isabela, and Ed Panlilio in Pampanga.

One was a radio commentator, the other a priest.

Neither of them have money, neither of them had political machinery — both of them were novatos — new to the political world.

And to cheat successfully in the Philippines, as we saw in a recent analysis, you need guns and goons, or gold. You need private armies, or you need the money to bribe either voters or counters.

Neither of which neither Padaca nor Panlilio had. They had volunteers who gave of their time and effort to help.

And yet, what did the Comelec’s second division find?

In the case of Padaca, the Comelec managed to find enough evidence of cheating to overcome the 17,000 vote lead of Padaca, and make her opponent win 1,051 votes. That takes some doing, and it took Comelec 12,000 pages to do it, including, in some parts of the decision, referring to Padaca as Sarmiento, and to her opponent Dy as Tuazon.

In the case of Panlilio, not only did the Comelec’s second division turn down his request for more time to raise funds for paying the costs of the case, but they seemed to have a strong desire to speed up the counting by allowing twenty teams of revisors at the same time instead of only the usual nine — and of course, that required even more funding than the usual.

Thus, Panlilio was left with only one revisor for every three that his opponent had — with the blessings of the Comelec’s Second Division, who scoffed at Panlilio’s plea, and asked him to use the “volunteers” he claimed to have had.

But there also seems to be more overt bias on the part of the Comelec Second Division.

Such as in the Isabela case, the name Faustino Dy was credited to Benjamin Dy for governor, while the names Gris Padaca or Grace Padacca, with a double c, was not credited to Padaca.

In the Pampanga case, the name Nanay Baby was credited to Panlilio’s rival, but the names Ed and Among were not allowed to be credited to Panlilio.

And that’s how Panlilio’s slim lead of over a thousand votes vanished, and his rival won instead by over 2,000 votes.

With that kind of decision-making process going on in Comelec, is it any wonder that it is fast losing whatever credibility it had?

For shame.

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