Senator Benigno Aquino III, the standard-bearer of the Liberal Party, is the frontrunner in the presidential race based on the surveys that were conducted in the run-up to the polls. His vice president, Senator Manuel “Mar” Roxas, is now tied with Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay, runningmate of former president Joseph Estrada, after leading for several months in the same surveys.
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Aquino is the only son of former president Corazon Aquino and her assassinated husband, Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, who are revered by many for spearheading the restoration of Philippine democracy in the 1980s.
Aquino's main rivals are Estrada, 73, and property magnate and Senator Manny Villar, 60.
Villar is counting on a nationwide political machinery to help him pull off a shock win, while former movie star Estrada retains strong support among the poor even after he was deposed as president in 2001 for being corrupt.
The Philippines is using computers for the first time to tally the votes in a bid to minimize the risk of cheating and to quicken the counting process that took weeks when done manually.
But glitches discovered in the week before the election – memory cards to be used in the computers were found to be configured incorrectly – fuelled fears about the credibility of the vote.
But Smartmatic-TIM, which provided the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines, was confident that 98 percent of the over 76,000 precincts would be holding automated elections.
“Massively, the system’s working. The machines are working,” Cesar Flores, Smartmatic president for Asia, told reporters.
He said that although they have received reports that some PCOS machines were encountering problems, these were “isolated cases.”
“We will be receiving incident reports…this is really happening. We’re very happy with the developments,” Flores said.
According to the Comelec National Operations Center at the Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City, the first school that opened for voting was the Bagong Pook Elementary School in Sta. Maria, Laguna.
“We are both nervous and excited,” Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal told reporters.
“Nervous because you really don’t know what to expect; excited because this is it. A lot of Filipinos are looking forward to this day,” he added.
The Commission on Elections said they were expecting an 85 percent voter turnout of the 50.7 million registered voters.
Larrazabal said that May 10 was just the beginning.
“It’s not yet over. We still have the counting and the proclamation,” he said.
Larrazabal said they would be receiving first updates from various polling precincts as early as 9 a.m.
“By 9 a.m. we should know how many PCOS [precinct count optical scan] machines are running, how many are not,” he said.
Comelec is expected to provide updates on the conduct of the polls nationwide at 10 a.m.
Meanwhile, the bloodshed that has long been part of politics in the gun-crazy Philippines looms over Monday's vote.
More than 17,000 positions are at stake – from president down to municipal council seats – and local politicians are infamous for using their own "private armies" to kill rivals or intimidate voters.
Five people were killed on Sunday alone in shootouts between local politicians' gunmen in remote areas of the Philippines.
"Violence during elections is rooted in our failure to control these armed groups operated by politicians," Rommel Banlaoi, head of the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research, told Agence France-Presse.
In the worst bout of political violence in the nation's history, 57 people traveling in a convoy, including 31 journalists, were abducted and killed last November in the troubled south of the country.
They were victims of a power struggle between two Muslim clans in the province of Maguindanao, which threatens to be a flashpoint area again on Monday.
The Ampatuan clan, accused of carrying out the massacre, has dozens of its people running for government posts despite its leaders being in jail awaiting trial for murder.
The patriarch of the clan, Andal Ampatuan Sr., is in fact running from behind bars for the post of Maguindanao vice governor.
First Posted 06:57:00 05/10/2010
By Abigail Kwok
INQUIRER.net, Agence France-Presse
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