EDITORIAL - Costly campaigns

A report this week on political advertising spent by national candidates during this year’s election campaign should encourage lawmakers to pass campaign finance reforms. They should consider it in their own interest to make running for elective office dramatically cheaper, and make them less beholden to vested interests that could embroil them in corruption scandals when the campaign donors cash in their chips.

If posted media advertising rates were strictly applied, candidates for national positions in this year’s elections including party-list groups spent a combined total of as much as P211 million a day during the three-month official campaign period.

This is the estimate of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, based on published television, radio and print rate cards that Nielsen Ad Intel reported. PCIJ noted that candidates could have been granted discounts by media organizations so actual ad spending could be lower. But if the printed rates were followed, several national candidates underreported the amounts they declared in the official statements of contributions and expenditures or SOCEs that they submitted to the Commission on Elections.

The Comelec, however, lacks the capability to determine the accuracy of SOCEs, and actual spending on media advertising may never be accurately ascertained. The Nielsen figures also do not cover spending on social media as well as expenditures before the deadline for the filing of certificates of candidacy, which can start at least a year before the official start of the campaign period.

What the PCIJ report indicates is that seeking elective office in this country, particularly for national positions, has become the domain of the enormously rich, or controlled by donors who come from the miniscule percentage of the population that controls national wealth.

Election watchdogs have proposed amending the law that puts an outdated cap on campaign expenditures, so that candidates can declare more accurate figures in their SOCEs. Clarity is also being sought on the privacy invoked by major campaign donors in refusing to be identified.

Proposals for campaign finance reforms have been tossed around in Congress for decades now. The 19th Congress should give the reforms more serious consideration.