There are incompetent people everywhere. They could be your friends, your boss, or even yourself. Incompetence is born out of nowhere, and attacks without consent, and leaves quite some damage and angry people pumping their fists up in the air.
Yet in something as important and groundbreaking as the first automated Philippine elections, incompetent people are around, and they are as numerous as ever. People like…
The PCOS machines
The little counting machines that resemble small printers are used in the 2010 RP elections in order to accurately tally up the ballots fed into it. It works with such accuracy that it nullifies the 90% chance of a failed election through manual counting because 90% of Filipinos could not count well (even I couldn’t).
Like most other machines created by man, these PCOS machines have one flaw: they fragile, and will bitch you endlessly to either fix or replace it once it starts to break.
The thing is, the voters are too astonished with the primitive 20 year old technology of the PCOS machines, that they step up and, shall I say, touch it indefinitely. This includes inserting their ballots wrong, placing their index finger instead of their thumb when prompted with the thumb scanning process (mostly because they do not know what the thumb is), or just plain bashing the machine because they believe it’s a devilish contraption of Satan. Which brings us to…
The voters
It’s 11 o’clock in the morning, and you’re in a line chock full of people who’d like to either pleasure themselves by touching the PCOS machines or destroy it. Temperatures soon reach ape-shit insanely-high, and the tension is getting worse. What’s the best thing to do? If you thought, beating the shit of everyone you see, then you are truly a Filipino.
You see, heat has been scientifically proven by a bunch of old people in white suits living in sterile places to be quite a downturn for many a person’s mood. That’s why when cartoons want to portray someone being pissed, they draw the character fuming.
But hell, that’s probably natural, considering the long heat wave that’s terrorizing the country longer than the NPA or the Abu-Sayyaf. Speaking of terrorists, let’s go to…
The Security Personnel
Boom! Did you hear that? It sounds like a, wait a minute, an improvised explosive device! What do you do? If you decided just sitting back and watch people chunks flying all over the place from massive explosions, welcome to the Philippine Armed Forces!
As of the Philippine election day, all active military staff are reques…no, ordered to stand guard and make sure that the elections moves smoothly. Reserve forces are also deployed to make sure (almost) nothing goes wrong. But they’re doing a shitty job. Rivalries between political clans block the voters from doing their duties, while some freaks circumvent the delivery of the ballots and tries to take them away and burn them because, well, you guessed it, they think they’re the papers of the Devil.
Now there are these uniformed people with guns they call soldiers. They’re supposed to keep the situation safe by any means possible, just to make sure that the elections don’t get derailed faster than an coke-obsessed generic celebrity from Hollywood. Some dicks decided to sabotage the elections by blocking the voters. What do you do? Stand by and watch? What the hell is wrong with you soldier? You have a weapon, go and use it, shoot the bastards.
Verdict
The Philippine 2010 National Elections resembles what it seems to be some sort of city where you try to get to work to feed the mouths of your hungry children when some dick decides to steal your money in exchange for not getting stabbed in the gut. In the elections, you do your best to perform your duties as a member of a democratic nation, but there are just these people who, voluntarily or not, make the job more difficult than usual.
