So, what to do with someone who bungled a very important contract for the government and who may have been an active partner to commit wholesale fraud? Why, give them a new contract, of course.

Apropos of the recent formation of Team Binay in next year's senatorial elections, I was reminded that the Commission on Elections has recently approved the purchase of the controversial Precinct Count Optical Scan machines for P1.8 billion. Yes, the same voting machines which may or may not have been responsible for mass cheating in 2010 will apparently be deployed once again next year, thereby changing the game for two polls in a row.

For worse, not for better. Because while our fraud-riddled manual system of voting and canvassing certainly needs upgrading, the way Smartmatic-TIM "modernized" the 2010 elections certainly does not allow it to have a second chance to do the same thing next year.

On paper, of course, election automation is an excellent idea. But the way Comelec and Smartmatic conducted the last polls, which were marred by allegations of cheating through the lack of digital signatures in the ballots and other serious problems that made proper auditing of the vote practically impossible, actually made many people pine for the old days when fraud was not so massive or untraceable.

The Comelec order to purchase the suspect PCOS machines was contested before the Supreme Court the other day by at least four election watchdog groups – and for good reason. Why should the provider of the technology be rewarded for its glitch-filled work two years ago, instead of being haled to court, its officials jailed for perpetrating fraud that remains the legacy of the first automated nationwide elections?

Make no mistake: the only reason why the people who said they were cheated in 2010 have not pursued their protests is because of the built-in futility of such a recourse. Election protests have traditionally been even more difficult to win than elections themselves; now, post-PCOS, the odds against winning a protest have increased exponentially, given the difficulty of tracing votes back to the precinct level and to individual voters that seem to have been deliberately embedded into those infernal machines from the get-go.

Perhaps the purchase and planned deployment next year of Smartmatic's machines are intended to work as the Aquino administration's Hail Mary pass to victory in 2013. Who else, after all, stands to gain from thwarting the people's will once again and in the process prevent President Noynoy Aquino from being a lame and sitting duck for the remaining three years of his term after the elections?

At the very least, Comelec must start a new bidding for providers of election automation technology instead of sticking with Smartmatic and its damned PCOS gadgets. And this time, Comelec had better make sure that whoever gets to win the contract secures the vote and provides the safeguards that the law requires.

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Various environmentalists' groups are up in arms over the cutting and balling of trees in Baguio City's Luneta Park atop one end of historic Session Road to make way for the expansion of the SM mall there. A local court has issued an order preventing more tree-cutting, which has been the subject of online protests since before Holy Week.

The Sy family which owns the country's biggest mall chain would do well to heed the court order and explain why it needs to cut old pines that dot the hill around the Baguio mall – and if it can guarantee that the process will not lead to further destruction of the summer capital's dwindling forest cover.

The balling of old trees, after all, has never led to their successful transplanting elsewhere. And amid reports of the secrecy of the removal of the trees, many Baguio residents fear that the mall owner is simply content to do away with them altogether, to make way for more mall space – something Baguio certainly needs a lot less than the old pines and other native trees that still grow in the city.

The mall has defended its actions by saying that the removal of the trees is necessary to achieve environmental sustainability in the area, of all things. The old trees will be replaced by other vegetation, including a "lushly landscaped Roof Garden with delightful water features" using something called Green Roof Technology.

The people of Baguio City, who have seen many of their trees removed in the past in the name of development in a city with a greatly deteriorated and extremely fragile ecosystem, are not impressed. As one online wag noted, SM may as well change its slogan to "We'll Cut It All For You."*