PERILOUS SUFFRAGE EXERCISE

FILE your candidacy. Get accredited. Campaign for votes among various sectors, communities, associations, and even religious to insure getting elected. Call up and bus your voters to the precincts. Get watchers to be on alert as votes are shown on screen. Check if your votes were truly counted by the machines -- how? This is the question.

Our right of suffrage gets snagged as soon as the counting process comes. We cannot be sure with the current system as whether a certain candidate truly gets the right number of votes as the voters have cast their ballots.

And so we should brace ourselves for the worst scenario. The electoral process in our country is shot from start to finish -- getting accredited as a party, much more so getting approved as a candidate is controlled, manipulated by parties close to and within the Comelec itself.

It is 2010 already, since women got the right to vote in 1937 and still our voting rights are not protected.

How do we solve this problem? Why, even electoral protests are very difficult to get into -- moneywise and justice-wise.

I do think that the current Philippine situation is really a matter for lawyers, judges and justices to resolve. If there is no justice in our country, that is simply because the sense of justice is low if not nill. We cannot rely on our legal institutions to help us overcome those instances of anti-human rights.

I hope that the bar passers of this year shall be of a different breed. I look forward to 2020 when we shall have had a truly just society. Meanwhile, we have to contend with the fact that the presidential candidate who knows how to conduct a People Power Revolution should be THE CANDIDATE and nobody else.

It is the parliament of the streets that will resolve unjust situations in our country, sad to say, in the long run.