Non-candidates

We have some of the most bizarre election practices in the world. The strangest has to be the one that converts candidates into non-candidates after they had filed their certificates and were duly accredited.

At all hours these days, we are ceaselessly assaulted by political advertising from people with money to burn. On the streets, we run into their giant billboards. They bombard us when we turn on our television sets or radio. They infiltrate our timelines when we access social media.

We get no respite from those who can afford to abuse us through repetitive encounters with their names and faces.

The most proximate reason for this advertising hell we go through is jurisprudence that says that throughout the period between the filing of candidacies and the start of the official campaign period, the candidates are not candidates. Their spending during this interregnum cannot be regulated by the Comelec. They are free to assault the voters as much as they can afford to.

Our jurisprudence creates the most offensive legal fiction there is. The candidates have filed their certificates of candidacy. Their names are on the ballots currently being printed, tailored for every locality. But in the eyes of the law, they are non-candidates.

The situation is as insane as our national budget.

The interregnum between the period when candidacies are filed and the formal campaign period happens because we chose to use vote counting technology that uses ballots unique to every locality. Every municipality has its own ballot listing local candidates.

Because the ballots are unique to each locality, they will have to be printed separately and in exactly the number of registered voters there are. This is a laborious process. But the system we chose to count our votes demand it.

In addition, we need time to weed out the certificates of candidacies to take out those considered “nuisances.” Long before elections are held, the Comelec plays God and slays those it decides will not make it anyway. The weeding process includes shortening the list of groups qualifying for our idiotic party-list system. This is to allow the number of names to fit the ballot – nothing more. And because of that, the certification process ignites court cases that are sometimes resolved long after the elections.

While giving so much authority to the Comelec to condemn certain candidates as “nuisances,” jurisprudence castrates the power of the same poll body to regulate campaign spending during the interregnum.

This whole process gives undue advantage to the moneyed candidates. While the poorer ones hibernate during the interregnum, the wealthier ones spend at will.

This along with the fictional existence of political parties inflates the cost of getting elected. This further fuels the trend towards dynastic politics.

The costs of mounting a campaign dissuade the meritorious but honest persons from joining the electoral circus. It favors those with name-recall to begin with. This reinforces the propensity of our current political systems to install clowns in elective office.

There has to be a better way to conduct electoral democracy in this country.

Bicam

This is where murder happens. It is called the Bicameral Conference Committee.

This has become such a powerful institution, it has been described the Third Chamber of Congress. It even has its own awe-inspiring nickname: the Bicam.

No other nation has inflicted this sort of institutional anomaly upon itself: a committee of deputies allowed to wheel and deal away from the public eye. This is why other countries generally fare better.

Much of the power the Bicam has gained is due to one thing: the utter lack of transparency in the work it does.

There are no records kept of the Bicam proceedings. There are no transcripts issued. There are no minutes available. This is more secretive that a papal conclave.

In a conclave, the ballot cast to elect a new pope are immediately burned. In the Bicam, all the participants, including those from the opposition, exit the meeting with a bad case of amnesia. No one remembers who inserted what in the national budget.

All the work of the two main chambers are negated by the whim of the Bicam. In the last “reconciliation” of the budget versions of the two chambers, the Bicam allowed the insertion of tens of billions of taxpayer money in programs that were not even discussed beforehand. The Bicam added to the budget allocations of both chambers. Neither the Senate nor the House objected to that.

Budget deliberations end up in the Bicam each year shortly before the Christmas break. By that time, our legislators are in no mood to do serious work. They generally ratify whatever the Bicam produces without reading. There is immense peer pressure to avoid doing their constitutional duties.

See what happened in the last Bicam. Tens of billions were moved to the pork barrel of the politicians. Mainline agencies suffered huge budget cuts. Key administration legacy programs were defunded. We have ended up in a situation where the President of the Republic is pitifully asking his Cabinet to scrounge around for money to fund vital, foreign-assisted projects.

It would be too kind to call this an “election-year budget.” This is the outcome of criminal enterprise.

Urgent reforms must be undertaken to strip the Bicam of the unjust powers that accrued to it by both executive and legislative inaction.