This is just a mental note to myself to make sure I don’t forget to write about the following topics:
1. Can the Republic Stand? I find myself increasingly in agreement with the opposition over the conduct of the canvassing. Ballot box after ballot box has proven incomplete, missing documents. And the Constitition is explicit about Congress having the obligation -not just the incidental, optional recourse to do so- to thoroughly investigate any questionable provincial return.
2. A jury system. The Americans didn’t institute one because they thought we little brown brothers insufficiently civilized. About time we did something about this.
3. Where can presidents be inaugurated?
The 1987 Philippine Constitution shall be amended especially some election provisions or pass the bill to modernize the voting system of our country. Better to modernize the voting system through computerization to avoid massive fraud and sort of vote-cheating. I went to the United States of America that I watched CNN 4 years ago about the computerized elections through touch-screen online.
Touch-screen voting online is useful that casts the ballot to the main server of the COMELEC and to count candidates’ vote in one day and each one of them surely will proclaim a winner.
This is the challenge to all neophyte legislators need to revise the Omnibus Election Code into cyber-method of voting. Di ba’t walang dayaang mangyayari muli sa 2010?
Oops, the link didn’t show.
http://www.lawphil.net/courts/rules/rc_1-71_civil.html#r32
Re trial by jury: Elihu Root, secretary of state to William McKinley, observed that the jury system was alien to the Spanish civil law system to which Filpinos in the civilized sections of the Islands were accustomed to.
The failure of the Organic Act of 1902 to include this right was challenged in Dorr v. US. The petitioners, who were convicted of libel under Philippine law, demanded an acquittal, citing, among others, that they were denied a jury trial. The US Supreme Court in essence said that since the Islands were an unincorporated territory, the US Congress had the authority to legislate such laws as it saw fit to govern it. Since the Organic Act did not extend the right to a jury trial to the Islands (since it was alien to the Spanish legal tradition to which the Islanders were familiar with), the lack of a jury trial was not sufficient to reverse their conviction.
Nowadays, Rule 32 of the Rules of Court authorize what is known as a trial by commissioner, but only in certain narrowly defined circumstances. Follow this link.
let’s not be fooled by the tactical importunings of the opposition
but who are the opposition fooling that they are after TRUTH and JUSTICE and FAIRNESS and DEMOCRACY?????? They are all after protecting their own hides! They are not after this nation’s interest!
if that’s the case then let’s declare the elections as invalid. oh what a waste! what a nation of cheaters indeed. what a shame to be filipino!