SOMEONE IS IN FOR A BIG SURPRISE

 

Marcos Jr.’s election campaign toolbox is jammed full: Lies, Money, and Surveys.

A. LIES

Based on data of Tsek.ph (a fact-checking collaboration of 34 academe, media, and civil society partners) covered since the filing of the candidacy up to mid-February, the election disinformation has targeted mainly VP Leni receiving negative messaging while Marcos Jr. earning positive branding.

“Robredo’s quotes have been mangled, twisted, [or] fabricated to make her look like she is spouting nonsense. She has been called, rather harshly, Madumb. Lutang, tanga, utal-utal.” (Yvonne Chua, journalism professor, and Tsek.ph’s project leader)

The distribution of disinformation appears to be coordinated which jibed with the Digital Public Pulse study on “networked political manipulation” carried out by highly influential yet dubious social media accounts. Right on such an issue, Twitter suspended more than 300 accounts from the supporter base of Marcos Jr. for violating the company’s platform manipulation and spam policy.

One eye-catching example of lies is posting the fake photo of a mammoth crowd of a Honda Biker’s Day in Pangandaran, Indonesia taken more than 3 years ago instead of the drone photo of the actual crowd of the UniTeam rally held in General Trias, Cavite. Not only was it wrong, one commenter wondered: if Marcos Jr. is the survey’s frontrunner, why is its camp doing such unashamed deception? Self-deception, anyone?

B. MONEY

Whistleblower Brittany Kaiser of now-defunct Cambridge Analytica exposed:

“When I joined Cambridge Analytica in 2014 we had already worked in the Philippines. There was a national campaign where my former company had gone in and undertaken national research to figure out what was the type of persona that would resonate best with voters…

“We had a request straight from Bongbong Marcos to do a family rebranding. This was brought in through internal staff at Cambridge Analytica and was debated. Some people didn’t want to touch it and there were others like our CEO Alexander Nix that saw it as a MASSIVE FINANCIAL OPPORTUNITY (underscoring mine) and asked us to write the proposal anyway. So, as you call it: historical revisionism.”

The Marcos ill-gotten wealth, even only a small chunk of that sum, could command a monstrous election war chest for Marcos Jr.’s campaign. One saying goes that when money sings, even the angels stop to listen.

But someone with lots of money in his election war chest could be in for a surprise.

Across the country, stories of the bungling of the money’s drawing power in the election campaign at the local level abound. One local candidate was running and getting an earful of sycophantic feedback from his minions about his fake lead in the survey. Pressed with the need to pour in more money to make a sure clean sweep in the race, the candidate bled himself financially dry by borrowing lots of money from his friends and the banks. He lost the election while his minions were rolling in his money with new motorcycles, home appliances, and brand new personal gadgets.

One provincial-level candidate entrusted loads of money to a local leader for his election campaign groundworks. The candidate lost his race so he called in on his leader to find out why. The leader and his family were nowhere to be found.

In each election cycle, one may wonder why some local candidates always run but always lose. Absurd? Not so fast. A sought-after asset one candidate has – like a venerable family name – could be so appealing that money would pour in from national- level candidates to tap his support – real or imagined -- at the local level. The way election campaign is being conducted in our country today, he could lay hands on tons of money during the for-the-fund-of-it election. Isn’t Isko’s P50m excess campaign contribution he has kept personally to himself a cut from this same cloth, though, like a polished fabric, his selfish ritzy act only looks smooth and subtle?

“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. “ 1 Timothy 6:10

C. SURVEY

The survey results that have propagandized Marcos Jr.’s lead by Pulse Asia are dubious. Al Vitangcol 3^rd of The Manila Times has rightly shown that such survey is unscientific based on the explanation of no less than the Pulse Asia president himself, Ronald Holmes.

Pulse Asia’s sample size of 2,400 in its surveys is unreliable. Vitangcol, in one of his columns, calculated that for a base voting population of say, 50 million with a confidence level of 99% and a margin of error of 1%, the required sample size is at least 16,572.

Holmes justified: “If you go and try to check whether you have a particular illness and you get a blood test, you do not take all the blood away out of your body. You take only a sampling of the blood. It’s the same probability design that is used in surveys.” Wrong analogy. Blood is homogeneous – you take a small sample anywhere in the body and it represents the whole blood. The voting population is heterogeneous – a small sample from one area does not represent the whole population.

Holmes explained: “We do not necessarily identify or stratify our respondents. We randomly select areas where we will get respondents. We did not get any respondents from Class A, B.” Flawed and slanted. Instead of stratified sampling, Pulse Asia uses simple random that results in surveys that lack accuracy and integrity.

Marcos Jr.’s operatives, citing the Pulse Asia research director’s explanation for his staggering lead in the dubious pre-election survey rating, have zeroed in on his name -- Marcos -- as a “highly popular brand” and his “association with his father” Marcos Sr. as the twin reasons for such staggering lead.

Place that explanation side by side with this unvarnished truth. According to the German anti-corruption NGO Transparency International, Marcos Sr. is the No. 2 most corrupt self-enriching leader in the world with a stolen amount of $5 billion - $10 billion next to Former Indonesian President Suharto. PH has recovered P174 billion from the Marcos loot and is still running after at least P125 billion owing to Marcos’ kleptocracy that brought about a gargantuan P203 billion estate tax debt which the civil society is now urging the BIR in filing a criminal case against Marcos Jr.

What will the whole world think of the Philippines after reading the press releases about Marcos Jr., the son of the dictator and plunderer, Marcos Sr., who now “has captured the imagination of the [40 million Filipino] voters” [60% of the voting population] and could become their next president?

The dubious survey is doing a great disservice to the Filipino people. The deduced implication is disparaging -- not only does it insults our intelligence, but it also projects a demeaning image on the Filipino character.

“One of the major dilemmas we face both as individuals and as a society is simplistic thinking – or the failure to think at all,” asserted Dr. M. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled And Beyond. ”It isn’t just a problem; it is the problem.”

We can think because we have a relatively big brain compared with other creatures. As thinkers, Filipinos are not that simplistic as the dubious survey results imply. This coming election, someone is in for a big surprise.