The Two Faces of Philippine Elections

By seven in the morning today, the 2013 Philippine Midterm Elections will be underway. This election will be the second time in Philippine electoral history that computers will be used. Despite a longer history of holding elections among democracies in Asia, the Philippines has been quite late in adopting technology in the electoral process. Indeed, Philippine elections have always been characterized as slow, chaotic, brutal, deadly, showbiz-like, and of course, the chronic incidence of wholesale, unabashed, shameless vote buying of entire constituencies.

A major feature of Philippine elections is the snail-paced nature of its counting process. I remember a time in the 80's were counting would take two months or more for national candidates' votes to be completely tallied. By this time, massive cheating would have taken place - accomplished by bribing electoral officials and teachers who are the frontline in the counting process, ballot box theft and tampering, ballot box stuffing and switching and if all else fails, the time tested terrorizing through the use of private armies, a staple feature of entrenched, carrier politicians who come from political dynasties. For the uninitiated, each Philippine island and province has an official political dynasty that has ruled that island or province as long as elections have been held in the country.

Counting has always been slow because politician's lacked the political incentive to actually improve the process. Tallying of votes has been traditionally conducted by hand, where teachers, who are mandated by law to handle the electoral process, manually read, tally and verify each ballot in their respective precincts. Vested political interests were comfortable with this system since it was easy to manipulate, control and tinker with.

Another chronic feature of Philippine elections is its chaos and brutality. In every Philippine election since independence from the U.S., somebody or someone would always die, either a candidate, a ruling politician, a journalist or the common man. Philippine elections is more of an exercise of money, showbiz and plain warlordism were candidates and incumbent powers invest money, and lots of it, to achieve power or to retain them, in such a scenario, they will do everything and anything in their power to gain or keep power simply because they have spent so much of their personal money, or in the case of incumbents, stole so much that losing is not an option. Either because it would mean an inability to recoup election expenses for those seeking power and the end of their rapacious greed in public contracts and expenditures for those who are gunning for re-election.

In all these scenarios, I would not wholly blame politicians and candidates, for to do so would not only be short-sighted and myopic, it is also simplistic. Equal blame can be placed upon the populace, who actually demand to be bought and bribed. For the average Filipino voter, elections are a means to earn money, to demand that politicians and candidates actually buy their votes.

In addition, the Filipino voter does not really care about platforms and plans, he cares more about the now, and the now is equal to money dispensed in exchange for his vote. This is not surprising too, the biting poverty that is a constant in the Philippines ensures that the vast majority of its voting population is economically disadvantaged and hence, prone to manipulation and exploitation by rich political families and their candidate offsprings.

Philippine elections therefore is not about policy but about personalities, it is not about choice but about money, it is not about good governance but about manipulating government resources for one's business interests, it is not about the public good but about the private interests of political families. It is the pretense of the rulers and the equal pretense of the ruled - of agreed disregard for the laws between the ruled and the rulers. It is really a feudal, oligarchic exercise cloaked in the mantle of modern liberal democracy.

The irony of Philippine elections is that it is actually played well by the political elite who pretend to serve and the masses who pretend to choose. That is the schizophrenic two-faced character that is my, nay our Philippine election.