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Then, just as Marcos prepared to mount the dais, disaster struck. It began to rain. As water poured down, the President's audience fled in all directions, ignoring loudspeaker pleas to stand fast and "sacrifice for what we are fighting for." Those who remained huddled closer to the speaker's platform. After the ten-minute downpour had ended, Imelda Marcos took the stage. Supporters cheered loudly when she urged the country to stand behind her husband because he was "maka-Diyos, maka-tao, maka-bayan" (pro-God, pro- people, pro-nation).
Marcos was conciliatory and bellicose by turn when he finally addressed the soggy gathering. For nearly 40 minutes he attacked his opponent's political inexperience and pleaded that it was the desire of the Philippine people, rather than his own wishes, that kept him in office. Then he warned that if his opponents took to the streets, "I will use the whole might and strength of the armed forces to protect the people and stop the opposition." Said he: "All we want is peace, not civil war."
The same day, Aquino received her strongest boost yet from Jaime Cardinal Sin, the ranking Roman Catholic prelate of the Philippines. The Cardinal praised the presidential challenger as someone who will "make a good President." He added, "I am tempted to ask, Is this a presidential election, or is this a contest between good and the forces of evil?" Sin's all-but- explicit endorsement carried considerable weight in a country that is nominally 84% Catholic.
Any final doubts about the Cardinal's sympathies were ended when he turned down an invitation from President Marcos and his family to pray together for honest elections. Said the prelate: "I think they can pray without me. It's better that they pray and ask the Lord for mercy and compassion."
The day after Sin's objurgation, Marcos raised the level of political tension yet again by placing the 230,000-member armed forces on red alert. Under that status, which was extended indefinitely, all military leaves and furloughs were canceled. Marcos' reason: Aquino, he claimed, had said that his re-election would spark a civil war.
As Filipinos thronged to their polling stations, problems with voting registries began to crop up almost immediately. At the Araullo High School, a rambling wood- and-concrete structure on United Nations Avenue in midtown Manila, Policeman Oligario Remiruta, 46, lined up to cast his vote. The local poll chairman could not find Remiruta's name on the voters' list. By noon, 84 people at the school had received the same treatment.
Other peculiarities cropped up. In the Manila dockside slum of Tondo, teachers at the Imelda Marcos Elementary School complained that they were being asked to recruit ten voters each for Marcos. Well before the voting began, Marcos operatives in northerly Quezon City were openly offering indigents money to fill out their ballots in advance.
Nonetheless, both Marcos and Aquino were ready to declare victory. As he prepared to fly from Manila to his hometown of Batac in the northerly province of Ilocos Norte, the President declared that "if the difference is only 3 million (votes), I'll be disappointed." Aquino voted in her hometown of San Miguel, in the southern province of Tarlac. Said she: "Today is my day. I hope to see you all at my inaugural."