EDITORIAL - Long overdue

Even members of the administration’s Team Unity senatorial slate are said to be worried about being cheated in the May elections. The concern is too late. By now cheating machineries should already be in place, and being fine-tuned for final execution.

If any of the re-electionist lawmakers is cheated, it would be poetic justice.

Election reforms are long overdue. Yet not a single proposed reform in the voting system was signed into law in the past three years, not even after the vote-rigging scandal involving former elections commissioner Virgilio Garcillano. Everyone was content to howl against cheating; not a single one lifted a finger to change the system that allows various forms of poll fraud to take place. No one had the nerve to overhaul the Commission on Elections and punish anyone involved in poll fraud or corruption.

The country’s voting system has been defective and vulnerable to manipulation since the regime of Ferdinand Marcos. But even after democracy was restored, votes were shaved and padded to favor certain candidates. The cheating starts during the campaign period, with vote-buying, intimidation, fielding of rivals’ namesakes and violations of almost every campaign rule. Yet the status quo must be so effective that little has changed in the past three decades in the way elections are conducted in this country.

Now candidates on both sides of the political fence fret that they would be cheated in May. They are complaining of various forms of unfair campaign practices. Dirty tricks departments are hard at work, engineering negative campaigning — the only type there is in this country. Campaign rules are routinely broken, and the Comelec appears powerless to punish violators.

The current situation should serve as a reminder that electoral reforms are long overdue. Candidates for Congress should remember their apprehensions about being cheated. If they manage to survive a fraud-prone poll system and win, they might see the urgency of enacting electoral reform laws.