Slow count

Our elections ought to be a national embarrassment.

Three weeks after ballots were cast, we haven’t officially canvassed the votes for president and vice-president. In India, with about half a billion voters, the results were known a day after balloting.

After a week of hysterically inane debates over the rules, our legislators have finally settled down to count. But that is no guarantee the process will be smooth. There are enough clowns in that chamber and enough ill motive afoot to ensure more infantile behavior on the floor – and consequently, further delays in the canvass.

Now we are being told the national canvass could go on for another three weeks!

Years ago, we passed a law mandating the modernization of our electoral process. The deadline set for modernization was three years ago.

Yet today, we continue on with one of the most antiquated electoral systems known to man. Incompetence and irregularity caused efforts at modernization to be aborted.

There was incompetence in design. For several elections now, we fidgeted with all sorts of counting machines. All those efforts put us behind the technology curve. We could have done better if we worked on a design ahead of the technology curve and began reworking our electoral process based on digitalization.

As a result, there was much technical debate over the propriety of the equipment being procured. If that was not complicated enough, the Commission on Elections went ahead to procure equipment without regard to bidding procedures. That caused the Supreme Court to step in and invalidate the deal.

But at the bottom of everything – the failure to get modernization going and the complicated, highly manual process that has evolved into place by historical accretion – is an electoral culture driven by absolute distrust.

No one, the adage goes, actually loses in Philippine elections. Those who fail to make it always claim to be cheated.

Because of that culture of distrust, our elections are constantly a spectacle of wasted manpower. Teachers are constantly forced into impossibly long hours in hot and humid precincts, harassed by voters, partisans and watchers. They are required to hold on to ballot boxes for over a day, of even for several days sometimes, until those boxes are received as the next level of counting.

Party watchers stick to ballot boxes like leeches. Soldiers and policemen are called in to guard them. This is done for days, for weeks.

The Batasan complex these days resembles Yasser Arafat’s headquarters. It is protected by armor. Marines are all over the place around the clock. Watchers eye each other warily as they guard the ballot boxes. In the distance, vigils from the contending camps sit through days and nights doing nothing really productive.

What a waste.

Election spending pumps up the inflation rate. The manhours wasted in this complicated exercise probably deduct a point from the expansion of our domestic productivity.

After the embarrassing spectacle we saw at the session hall all of last week, constitutional experts now say we ought to seriously review the mandate given to Congress to perform the presidential canvass. Indeed, why ask a highly partisan assembly to count the votes of a highly partisan exercise?

The problem, however, is much larger than that. We have to reinvent entirely the manner we choose our leaders.

Never again should elections bring our nation to the edge of chaos. Never again should it cost so much to get elected to national office that each and every winning national candidate finds himself entirely captive to vested interests.

Never again should our most vital institutions of leadership be overrun by people who are popular but incompetent. Never again should our nation’s future be dictated upon by celebrity politics.

The task of reforming our elections, clearly, involves reforming the entire edifice of our politics.

In the course of the last campaign, President Gloria promised constitutional reform. We hope that process begins forthwith after the dust of the last election clears.

Our experience over the last few weeks and months tells us it is time to junk the presidential system and the bicameral legislature.

The presidential system was supposed to insulate our governance from discontinuities. Our experience so far has taught us that the presidential system has become the biggest source of discontinuity in our government.

It makes the executive branch of government vulnerable to the quirks of our electoral politics. Any time, a charismatic adventurer may rouse the ignorance of our voters and capture power, overturning all sense of purpose in our national leadership. Any time, a gang of opportunists can stage an electoral coup by dragging a popular icon to center stage and exploiting the vulnerabilities of the poor and under-informed.

Any time, a populist rabble-rouser can step in, fire up the worst passions of our people and overturn the policies that ensure sustainable development.

Things started turning grossly wrong for presidential politics in this country in 1998, when Joseph Estrada politicized poverty and used that as the avenue to power. Elected on a wave of populism, however, the Estrada presidency could not meet the expectations of the poor for subsidies and freebies without compromising the whole dynamism of our country’s progress.

Our nation requires far-sighted strategic management at the very top. But our electoral politics throws up populist flotsam to inhabit the institutions of governance.

Our electoral politics is at odds with the quality governance our country requires to progress.

Much will have to be done to rehabilitate both our democratic institutions and our electoral politics. There is much urgency to this task.

But even before we can even begin to contemplate this task, we will have to get through this yet unfinished electoral exercise. The next few days and weeks, as we endure a long, partisan count, let us all hope this will be the last messy, antiquated electoral process we need to endure.