Koko Pimentel is impatient to unseat the 12th placer in the senatorial elections of 2007. That’s Sen. Migz Zubiri, who’s just as keen to end the suspense wrought by the discovery of 50,000 or more spurious ballots, hundreds and hundreds of them done by one and the same hand.

The fake ballots were among those contained in 25 percent of the boxes opened in the pilot areas, Manila and Quezon City. To speed up the poll-protest proceedings that are agonizingly slow for both young men in a hurry, the senator asks that the remaining 75 percent be opened so that once and for all, “if nothing substantial is uncovered in those 75 percent, I will go.”

In his opinion, opening 10,000 boxes shouldn’t take more than six months, not six years as Mr. Pimentel and his lawyers fear.

In the event that no further proof of fraud is uncovered, that’s when he’ll ask that the ballots coming from Bulacan and Batangas, known as Mega-Manila, be examined as well.

Indeed, why should the electorate allow the elections to be won by an entrenched syndicate that cheats for both (or all?) sides, when even the Senate Electoral Tribunal affirmed that “both Pimentel and Zubiri admitted that ballots of dubious integrity were discovered”?