HANDLING ELECTIONS

Why is electing officials in our country so difficult to conduct? Why do candidates have to spend a lot in order to be voted upon?

First of all, our country is archipelagic. But this is not a problem since we have officials in every place, from the barangay to the regional offices of the executive department apart from the other branches to take care of the needs of our people. And yet, the manner of electing is prone to manipulation by seen and unseen corrupt hands, eager to dip their fingers into the peoples' coffers once seated.

Secondly, our country is steeped in English use so that the simple rules of Comelec are not being well-studied. Can you see many of those officials talking in English, explaining their rules on radio and tv, as if they were only talking to the highly educated classes? In other words, our people, many of whom are school drop-outs will have to crack their brains trying to decipher the step by step meaning of every word they say.

So, here it becomes incumbent upon Comelec officials to speak the dialects -- every single province must have a Comelec official explaining in the people's language or dialect every rule.

Thirdly, the Comelec is not exercising its duty to inform the public in an official manner who the candidates are, their backgrounds, and their platform of government. In other words, it is lacking in the performance of its role as a guardian of the people's suffrage. Instead, it only deals with those issues that can keep them in the limelight, the not so heavy issues which really are the most contentious.

Every candidate of the DPP that I have talked to has voiced his and her misgivings about the Comelec. One said that they were asked to shell out 5 million in the last elections in order to get accredited as a partylist. Another said that they won in the elections but were not allowed to sit -- the agrarian reform beneficiaries. "Nasunog ang Comelec kaya hindi na mabilang ang boto," Eben Martizano, the head, said. A third, from the KBL party wondered how on earth, a party member of theirs, who was not even endorsed as candidate, managed to get a nod to be the presidential candidate. Really, wonder of wonders. Only in the Philippines.

Even if the Comelec is headed by a former Supreme Court justice now, it has not gotten off the rut of negative comments that are continuously being thrown at it.

Yet when I read of elections in the highly developed countries, their conduct are very elegant, as the people can really see who the candidates are, how they show up on TV during debates, and the people go on with their lives as if the elections were only one of those daily activities they are going through. In other words, choosing their leaders is a common, ordinary thing, not the be-all and end-all of existence.

Hence, with the way the elections are being conducted, mudslinging, murdering, and what have you going on right now, where incumbents and those relatives of incumbents are taking advantage of their positions in government, like the relatives of someone in NCR who keep on violating the ordinances against political propaganda, we can be sure that more blood will be poured come election day.

Yes, I can see how the camps of the different candidates will be slugging it out to get the voters to their sides. And once that happens, then the AFP and the PNP will have their hands full. The judicial branches have better prepare to bring the courts in the field in order to settle disputes right away which could roll up to dire civilian conflicts.

Meanwhile, the latest report is that the Democratic Party of the Philippines is filing a TRO against the Comelec to stop it from executing its functions while the protests against the total rejection of the party's candidacies at the Supreme Court is going on. No, we cannot allow the Comelec to go scot free as if they could just do their thing without being held accountable for mismanagement.

So be it.