197 Reform and Abolition: The Philippine Party-list System levels but the same condition prevails within the election body itself. Members of the House of Representatives, for instance, prefer to retain a patronagedriven election body to control elections in the legislative districts.17 Whether at the national or local levels, the commission has been widely known to be reeking of corruption. 16 Despite its quasi-judicial and police powers, the Comelec has been unsuccessful in reducing if not completely eliminating the use of violence, overspending, and other forms of fraud such as vote buying and “dagdagbawas” (vote shaving and padding) during elections. Many dynastic politicians continue to gure in incidents of fraud and violence particularly with the use of private armed groups and sometimes in complicity with police and military forces. In truth, some Comelec ofcials are widely believed and have in fact been accused of direct involvement in election fraud. This was shown in the infamous “Hello, Garci” tapes that linked a number of poll as well as military and police authorities to election fraud in the 2004 presidential race resulting in a controversial win by Gloria M. Arroyo. No impeachment initiatives or massive street protests could unseat Arroyo but the illegitimacy of her presidency continued to hound her till the end of her term in 2010. The gridlocks to reforming the Comelec refer to a “three-pronged pathology” that the institution has long suffered from, according to a study. The “externally-motivated clientelistic relationship” where a patron seeks the support of a client from within the Comelec for advantageous electoral outcomes constitutes the rst pathology. A classic example is the 2004 GMAGarcillano conspiracy. The second is an “internal clientelistic relationship” where the patron is inside the bureaucracy (Comelec) itself and the clients occupy subordinate positions within the same structure. The third concerns the Comelec's organizational inefciency and lack of capacity.18 The institutional weaknesses of the Comelec have thus made efforts at instituting reform in the electoral system dismally below expectations if not ending in debacles. In the only reform measure that was initiated more than 20 years ago, the automated election system (AES) was launched in 2010 followed thereafter in 2013 and in the May 2016 national and local elections. Both the legislative authors and poll ofcials believed that the AES would save the electoral process from fraud and lead to the “modernization of democracy.” Automation, however, has been marred by issues on procurement, transparency, software, accuracy, transmission, and security as well as the noncompliance with the minimum system requirements under RA 9369 and the Omnibus Election Code that rendered the election results questionable in both the 2010 and 2013 elections. Poor project implementation as well as lack of IT expertise of the Comelec top bureaucracy has left the poll automation practically under the hands of the technology marketing foreign supplier, Smartmatic-TIM. This has compelled election watch groups as well a Supreme Court senior justice to raise concerns whether the country's sovereign election