Dumb, dumber

In an effort to redeem herself of her stupidity, Karen Davila has made Election Automation as her subject in her “Correspondents” edition on ABS-CBN last night (16 February 2010). Here she deftly interviewed various personalities on their experience on voting, inspecting, heckling and anything and everything to do with the coming automated polls.

And again she showed that she just another pretty face.

She just laps up the script, obviously put together or her. It shows so many flaws of her understanding of the voting, counting and canvassing system and processes.

Okay, so perhaps I’m a tad too harsh on the girl. So she probably slaved over the script from conception to execution. But she was remiss by taking everything her key interviews hook, line and sinker.

I’m talking about extensively lending an ear to everything the dashing Senator “Chiz” Escudero and to the valiant technical experts of the AESWatch while just giving a few perfunctory remarks to the officials of Comelec and Smartmatic-TIM, just so she could say she was “balanced.”

Why didn’t she interview, say, Teddyboy Locsin – who has been calling a spade a spade in the same oversight committee hearings on automated elections? Is it because she didn’t want Teddyboy her precious AESWatch people the obstructionists that they are, throwing a monkey wrench on the automated polls because they did not corner the contracts and have a piece of the pie? Yes, Teddyboy’s pointing at you, Gus Lagman and Mano Alcuaz and Evi Tan. Talk about conflict of interest (Watch out, guys. your YELLOW streak is well documented, coming soon in a blog nearest you! Nyahaha!).

Why did Karen Davila call all the recent pre testing and mock election exercises a failure when they did the job – they received votes, counted them and transmitted them? Granted, some PCOS machines first id not want to receive, some did not want to transmit initially… but that’s just a few minutes delay! The bottomline is they worked a few seconds or minutes later… a far cry from the days and weeks it took to manually do these tasks!

Simple: the AESwatch guys in the interview said they failed.

Why did Karen Davila spend so much airtime on the folly of voters who did not follow instructions in filling up the ballots? Why did she not compare it with a demonstration of the old manual system, including how they used to manipulate the voting and vote counts?

Did she not watch her ABS-CBN colleague Kim Atienza when he did his own Election Automation documentary showing clearly how the old manual system was being improved by the new automated system? Or she doesn’t respect him as a journalist because he calls himself  “Kuya Kim” and dresses like he’s out on safari?

Well, who cares? Karen Davila’s pretty face gets my vote anytime!