SQUATTERS & SURVEYS: Today, April 15, is the deadline for the filing of income tax returns for taxable year 2009. The date reminds us of two items long playing in our mind:

1. There is the recurring suggestion that a way be devised to minimize or water down the value of the election votes of tax-evaders and those who do not file income tax returns.

Many times, those who do not pay income tax or even bother to file ITRs, or who hardly contribute to the public fund, are the noisiest whiners and most demanding for government attention.

2. Some pre-election surveys are mere “table” surveys that are prepared much like ITRs: The taxpayer first decides how much to pay, then works out the cascading figures to justify the bare-bone tax that he deigns to toss to the Bureau of Internal Revenue waiting under the table.

Some surveys are manufactured in similar fashion. The top honcho of the survey outfit decides what scores to assign to his clients and the rest, then sits down at his table to work out the breakdown, tweaking “survey” data as to economic class, region and other categories to support the predetermined scores.

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SQUATTING BLIGHT: The idea of denying voting rights to those who do not perform their corresponding responsibilities as citizens — such as paying taxes — brings up another point related to squatters, also known by the pompous label of “informal settlers.”

One way of discouraging squatting, an illegal practice blighting urban areas, is to deny water and electricity connections to anybody who cannot show proof that he owns the lot and/or dwelling or holds a valid rent/lease contract.

We should not pamper usurpers of private property who wreak havoc on our Torrens title system. However, vote-hungry politicians coddle squatters invading idle private lots, clogging waterways, dumping garbage indiscriminately, and then demanding payment for relocating.

Squatters write friends and relatives in the provinces about the grand time they are having, thus encouraging the migratory birds of the same feather to flock to the overcrowded cities.

Of course, a positive move is to spread to the provinces the opportunities for employment, livelihood, schooling, amenities, et cetera. But meantime, let us explore negative measures too.

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TEAR CEDULAS: Another practice related to income tax payment is the forced sale of cedulas or community tax certificates bearing personal details required in the ITR forms.

The need for cedulas in filing ITRs and documenting public transactions should be dropped for being arbitrary, confiscatory and a case of double taxation.

A century after the plebian Andres Bonifacio and his bolo-wielding “mga kapatid” tore their cedulas in a mass protest dramatizing their resistance to a foreign colonizer, that historical piece of paper is still around.

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DOUBLE TAXATION: If the cedula’s rationale is to identify bonafide residents of a community, it is useless. It has no picture and security features. It is routinely issued without seriously checking the information entered into it or the person applying for it.

Obviously the only reason why the government insists on it is to raise revenue (more than half of which will just be stolen or misused).

The cedula tax paid is variable, based on the income and the real property of the applicant. But since our income and our real property are already taxed to the max, making them again the bases for imposing the community tax is a case of double taxation.

Will a reputable lawyer please challenge the cedula in court? I mean a really good case – not a Lozano-type petition deliberately punctured with legal loopholes to ensure its being thrown out.

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DELUSION: The Commission on Elections must level with the people and cast away the delusion that its vaunted P7-billion-plus automated election system for May 10 is 99.9999-percent secure.

The Comelec headed by Chairman Jose Melo should snap out of the spell cast upon the excited commissioners by the huge budget, the technical jargon and the slick demonstration of computerized gizmos they were seeing for the first time.

Facing reality frontally and acting now, in concert with well-meaning technical and civic-minded groups, can minimize the scary possibility that the integrity of the coming elections will be compromised by machine and man-made problems.

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EXPERTS WARY: Information technology experts highlighting possible massive cheating are asking the Comelec to do a manual count parallel to the automated counting and transmitting of the election results.

Ma. Corazon Akol, president of the Philippine National IT Standards Foundation (PhilNITS), advised: “The citizenry may be lulled into thinking that because the May 10 automated elections will use high-tech machines and computerized systems, (they are) virtually free from cheating.

“The truth is that the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines, the operating and transmission programs and the whole system itself can be rigged, without our even knowing how or where the new sophisticated dagdag-bawas (padding and shaving of votes) scheme might be perpetrated.”

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SECURITY FEATURES: Augusto Lagman, lead convenor of transparentelections.org, said: “They can hide a cheating program in PCOS… preset results can be stored in compact flash cards.”

He added that election results may still be tampered with during the transmission and canvassing of votes.

Akol said many security features of the AES provided by law had been “disregarded, removed or replaced with vulnerable alternatives.”

“The pilot testing of the system was not done, the source code review, as strictly defined by law, was not granted, on-the-spot verification by the voter and the ultraviolet detector were disabled, and controlled access features were disregarded,” she said.