There are three points you want me to talk about this afternoon:
(1) the Philippine political situation in general
(2) an assessment of the May 2007 elections and its implications
(3) the next steps for the 2010 elections.
Where are we now?
Two years ago, we were undergoing a political crisis. A “crisis”, experts tell us, is a turning point in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events for better or for worse is determined. A turning point can be brief or protracted. A crisis can progress from symptomatic to acute to chronic stages to a final resolution. I would say that, since the apex of the crisis in the July 8 weekend when the Hyatt 10, former President Aquino and others called for the President to resign, the crisis had settled to a protracted acute stage after July 2005. That the elections took place and did not result in any national outrage at the admittedly flawed process and that the results were generally accepted by the people helped bring more normalcy into the country as early as one week after the elections.
However, the distrust of the Arroyo administration is still at a high, although, diminishing level, and the issues of a cheating president and the perceived lack of alternative leaders and of damaged institutions, still hover over us and will probably not clear up until credible elections in 2010 produces a more credible leader.
I believe that there is a lesson to be learned from the failed July 8,2005 weekend and the events leading up to the May 2007 elections – that we must listen to the people. During the Arroyo administration, never had civil society been so close to the seat of government since the time of the Aquino administration. Through friends in and around the palace, a number of civil society concerns were listened to and effectively addressed. But I think that we got so used to the process, and our proximity to power and the effective back-channelling, that in the exuberance of our successes, we forgot where the real power lies – the people, and we did not listen to what they were saying.
The resign movement failed to read the changing paradigm of people power. People power is not dead nor is it suffering from fatigue. But the people seem to know ahead of those who would be their leaders that the exercise of that power is more relevant at the community level as an instrument to make life better for themselves – whether making the barangay system work, making local officials more accountable, or working with NGOs in improving governance, or resisting projects that endanger the environment. The people are not indifferent to and do care about the moral issue of a cheating president but they think that it is not worth the risk of street violence or disruption of their livelihood to take sides in power disputes among the leadership elite, among equally unattractive alternatives. EDSA 2, while successful, is a dangerous precedent that many people did not want to duplicate and remains a problematic legal and political issue to this day. The “parliament of the streets” was a default option because the institutions for dissent and redress of grievances (the courts, congress, direct appeal to leaders, a free media) were closed to the people. That is no longer the case. People appear to be wary and weary of “extra-constitutional” measures and prefer more traditional democratic processes such as impeachment proceedings, resort to the judiciary and, above all, free and fair elections.
That agenda is, in fact, already in play. We stopped the cha-cha train by prevailing through a heart-stopping battle in the Supreme Court, which many people said was surely going the President’s way because she had appointed 10 of its 15 members. They were wrong and we were right. It was an 8-7 vote but it was 5-5 vote when it came to her appointees. So were key decisions made by an increasingly independent Supreme Court on attempts of the Arroyo administration to test the boundaries of its constitutional powers. We also stopped the Con-ass, helped by the arrogance of power displayed over national television, and the May elections proceeded as scheduled. These are signal victories that the people appear to support.
Charter change is dead, even by a constitutional convention because the administration, the opposition, and civil society are uncertain of its outcome. The business community is happy with the economy and the solutions to what were being peddled as constitutional obstructions, such as in mining. If fact, I think they got more that what they expected. We are on a roll.
But we also lost some battles. The civil society proposal for a fact-finding commission did not prosper. Many conditions for participating in the elections did not come to pass, notably a revamp of the Comelec, election automation, a fourth commissioner. But those thinking of boycott ended up protecting the ballot anyway. It is just as well. I believe that boycotting is really not a viable option. If it was not an option in the 1984 and 1986 elections, what more now. It is better to fight, even by their rules, against any attempt by authoritarianism from the right or the left, than leave the field open for them to do as they please. As we learned from the events leading up to EDSA 1, there is a redeeming value in every battle, even those we lose, as a source for renewal and hope.
The 2007 elections was still a step forward for our democracy. The political turbulence and doomsday scenarios did not, and are not likely to, happen. Times have changed. Outrage that is not spontaneous is out, so are extra-constitutional short-cuts; step by painful step of nation-building is in. How true, what someone said – that patriotism is not the sudden and frenzied outburst of emotion, but the quiet and steady dedication of a lifetime. The question is: are we up to it?
If the May 2007 elections is any indication, there is reason to hope.
There were really two elections last May – a national election for senators and congressmen and local elections for provincial, city and municipal officials. About 98.5% of the positions at stake were for local government positions. For purposes of this assessment, congressmen who are voted by district are considered to be “locally” elected.
These two elections involve different decisions by the voters which are not necessarily aligned with each other. On the one hand, the voters are asked who they want to represent or lead them in their local constituencies and, on the other hand, they are asked their preference for the national leadership. Since the recent elections is a mid-term elections, the senate vote can be considered as a proxy vote on national leadership - as an indirect referendum, so to speak. That is why both the administration and the opposition are claiming victory. The opposition is looking at the senatorial elections, and some high profile local contests, and the administration at the over-all results in the district congressional and local government elections. In a way, they are both right because they are not talking about the same elections.
A book entitled Philippine Democracy Assessment (a joint project of the British Council, Fredrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Philippine Democracy Audit and Transparency and Accountability Network) suggests that it is more meaningful to go beyond measuring the “success” of a democracy to a measurement of its quality depending not on “expert common sense”, which is usually critical of and cynical of democracies, but more on “people common sense”, which is more optimistic and supportive of democracy. It suggests that changing the everyday practices and assumptions of citizens may have greater impact on the institutional edifices of the Philippine government and state than more formal means.
I agree with the “people common sense” approach because it is more important to listen to what the citizens themselves are saying about our democracy, or what James Surowiecki aptly describes in his book as the unerring “wisdom of crowds”. It is a most interesting book because it articulates the fundamental principle of a democracy that, in his words, “the many are smarter than the few”. And why our collective intelligence, such as the one expressed in free and fair elections, is what ultimately makes a democracy work.
If our politicians are too busy interpreting the elections in personal terms, they may miss the important signals being sent by the people about the elections – that there is a significant alienation from and distrust of the electoral process, as manifested, for example, in the low voter turnout rate in most places of about 60% (low by our standards), which must be urgently addressed, but that, despite the increasing alienation, the people still prefer elections as the best way to choose their leaders as against a military takeover, a revolutionary government, a people power upheaval or a self-serving revision of the Constitution
There is unmistakably a strong clamor for electoral reform both from those who stayed out from the voting and from those who went out of their way to protect the ballot or felt personally victimized by the process. By “process” I mean any of the stages from voter education, the legal framework, the voters’ list, the procedural aspects, the incidents of violence, the counting and canvassing to the resolution of disputes. This process can be either credible, tolerable, questionable or non-credible, even abusive. It is possible for a process to be questionable and still have credible results. And for a process to appear regular and therefore “credible” and the results to be fraudulent and non-credible (such as Maguindanao).
The reality is that the elections is more than the Commission and the Commission is more than the commissioners. The Comelec consists of only 5,000 people. On election day, that infrastructure balloons to about 1.2 people million people consisting of teachers, the police and military, citizens arms and other deputies. The Comelec, particularly its Chairman, is the most powerful government agency in the country for 120 days before and 30 days after elections. But once the elections gets underway, it is what the rest of the 1.2 million people do or not do that can make or unmake elections.
My assessment is that, except in places where the “Garcillano boys” continued to operate, or in places where the Comelec’s independence was compromised by local political kingpins, the Comelec field officers and deputies delivered generally acceptable results despite the burden of poor leadership. That happened as well in the 2004 elections (which, incidentally, I believe President Arroyo really won, albeit by a smaller margin), except that the issue of cheating in the 2004 presidential elections casts a long shadow on any objective over-all assessment of the process.
The 2007 elections was terribly flawed but it was on the whole tolerable if not satisfactory (credible in many places questionable is some and abusive in a few), and that the over-all result genuinely reflected the will of the people. It is easy enough to see that, except for agitation in a few local communities, normalcy resumed in the country within a week after the elections. In other words, even when our democracy is not in its best behavior, our democracy works. Of course, we all wish we can make it work better so that our people can trust it as the means to a better life.
Unfortunately, that is more easily said than done. The fact is that every President after Cory Aquino (Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo) weakened rather than strengthened our electoral process by the quality of their appointments to the Comelec and the lack of statesmanship to push for electoral reforms, regardless of the consequences to themselves. The Congress shares the blame, including the opposition, because appointments to the Comelec need confirmation by the Commission on Appointments of which they are all a part. We have yet to find a leader who will not yield to the temptation of an electoral system that is so tantalizingly vulnerable to manipulation, especially when it involves plans to stay longer in power. That is why the election problem of many areas of Muslim Mindanao continues to hound us. Those in power, when it is their turn, want to use what is euphemistically called “command votes” to their advantage. The government coalition should not be proud to use that term to describe its vote because it connotes intimidation, violence and fraud. It means that whatever results a warlord “commands”, he gets, regardless of the means. That doesn’t sound like free and fair elections, it sounds like a crime. .
The major flaws in the recent elections were – the use of money (mostly government-sourced) disenfranchisement, the flawed implementation of a flawed party-list law, exclusion of a huge number of qualified overseas workers, the high incidence of violence, and, most of all, irregularities in procedures, some of them in order to accomplish fraud.
Since elections is a process, procedures partake of the substance of the right. And it is part of the problem when the Comelec leadership say, “prove it”, invoking the formal rules of evidence, when elections is not primarily a problem of law, it’s a problem of management. That is why the Comelec is an administrative agency first and foremost, not a judicial one, because its job is to manage that process well, planning carefully to prevent or pre-empt violence and fraud, and quickly correcting what goes wrong, in accordance with effective management practices and not the technicalities of the law. The Comelec, especially the new commissioners, should be held accountable for not listening to calls to rotate the “garcillano boys” out of ARMM, particularly Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao, which they could have done, instead of rationalizing their retention because “they are presumed innocent until proven guilty”. They missed the point of their principal responsibility – to apply the highest standards of management practice to elections, and that includes putting the right people in the right places.
What are some indicators in assessing the quality of the electoral process?
1) There were about 18,000 positions at stake in these elections. The latest information from the Comelec is that the total number of election cases which effectively question the results (protest cases and pre-proclamation proceedings) number about 350. In 2004, the total number was about the same. Even if we allowed for the fact that there were many places where there were no real opposition candidates and instances where the losers did not think it was worth the effort, we are talking about 2%-5% of the contested positions being questioned. In other words, the results in about 95% of the elections appear to be accepted by the people. In my book, that is a very high passing mark.
2) In terms of incidents reported to the citizens’ arms like PPCRV, NAMFREL-NASSA and LENTE, the three most reported are vote-buying, disenfranchisement of voters, and rregularities in procedures (i.e. denial of access by watchers to the counting and canvassing, lack of training of teachers and deputies, unauthorized procedural changes by local Comelec, etc). The number of incident reports is probably about 250 or about the same as in 2004, which is a tolerable level in a tedious manualized system that is prone to error or fraud. In comparative scale, that number was 750 in 1986. It should be noted that an “incident” can mean numerous instances of the same irregularity in one polling place.
3) The bad news is that the level of violence was unnecessary high, the second highest since elections were synchronized in 1992. The fatalities were 60 in 1992, 87 in 1995, 82 in 1998, 132 in 2001 and 189 in 2004. The real number of “election-related” casualties was 229 by PNP records (per CER), which would make it the highest level since 1992. But for public consumption, the PNP says it was lower by changing the definition to “election-motivated” casualties. Most of these casualties were avoidable with better management - by better intelligence gathering by the PNP (which boils down to people’s trust, since most intelligence data come from ordinary citizens), by better planning by the Comelec (a matter of competence which can be corrected in the future) and by the government not issuing legal arms to local warlords like in Maguindanao (using the excuse of arming citizens against terrorism). In fact, most of the violence happened in “hotspots” already known to the PNP before the elections. There is some good news, if one can call it that, in the sense that the violence seems to be limited to some 15% of the local areas and was not a national phenomenon, and, more significantly, that despite the violence, people managed to vote against previously entrenched political families in some places such Abra, Masbate, Nueva Ecija, Cavite, Pampanga, Isabela, etc.
Did the voters cast an intelligent vote? Again there are good signs – I contend that it has been there for sometime even in 1998. We all know by now that there is no significant correlation between media expense and winning in the senatorial race, that the two most handsome actors in the movie industry failed to win a senate seat, that the best legislator among the senatorial candidates bucked the opposition trend and won handily (Angara) and, in the local elections, as already mentioned, there were hopeful examples of independent thinking by voters across economic classes. And while I agree with the opinion that this elections has not changed the political landscape significantly, I think that, as argued by the book (Philippine Democracy Assessment), the character of the so-called dynasties may be changing. It appears that many “dynasties” are no longer tied to land ownership, the traditional cacique connection. More and more family-based politicians belong to the professional class, and that is a significant improvement in the landscape.
(In the 1998 elections, the “expert common sense” told us that it was not an intelligent vote when the people voted for President Estrada, with his known addiction for womanizing, gambling and drinking When asked at that time in surveys who they would vote for, the more common answer was – those who are pro-poor. And that is how the vote went because Estrada was perceived as sincerely pro-poor. But he had a strange definition of corruption and he tried to run the country like a small town mayor. The 1998 elections is still considered as an overdue and successful revolt of the poor against the rich; the poor had the right criteria but they picked the wrong champion. When the question was asked again in surveys in 2001, this time the answer had changed – the vote would go to those who know how to run the government. And that is how the vote went, with the poor almost evenly divided between the two leading candidates. At least the poor learned their lesson. They do vote intelligently, it is the rich who vote for narrow self-interest.)
We can safely say that the dismal record of the Abalos Commission remains unbroken, not only in managing the elections but in failing in the advocacy of badly-needed and intelligently-crafted electoral reform legislation. The good news is that there are still many good career people in the Comelec who can form the nucleus for a Comelec renewal.
Fortunately, Chair Abalos and the remaining two commissioners who were part of the 2004 elections are leaving by February 2008. Comm. Borra ended up a big disappointment. He was more concerned, I am told by Comelec insiders, to ensure a secure retirement. However, the three newest commissioners have good records of integrity and legal competence and have so far performed relatively well, except for a few disquieting decisions and what Philip Zimbardo in his outstanding book “The Lucifer Effect” described as the “evil of inaction” that “supports those who commit evil by not acting to challenge them”, in the Comelec case - the interest of collegial harmony? However, I do not think that they allowed themselves to be part of any centrally directed institutional manipulation or partisan political maneuvering, such as in 2004.
The most luminous star in the 2007 elections is the performance of the citizens arms. But you know that because you were part of it. For the first time since 1992, the church-based groups, namely the PPCRV, Namfrel, Nassa, after a false start, finally worked closely together and were better prepared to make a qualitative assessment of the elections, even in Muslim Mindanao. These groups coordinated their work through VforCE. Lente (Legal Network for Truthful Elections), organized on the initiative of One Voice with the Integrated Bar of the Philippines as co-convenor – fielded for the first time lawyers and para-legal volunteers for electoral work specifically to safeguard the process at its weakest link – the multi-stage canvassing of votes, got off to an auspicious start. Let us enjoy in the moment, but let us not get carried by by the testimonials. There is much work to be done. Our coverage had many gaps and the number of volunteers fell short of the one million target partly because the mobilization was delayed by the competition between Namfrel and Nassa on the quick count accreditation. There is a lot of double counting of volunteers if we simply add up the number of IDs issued by the major partners. But we were in the right places at the right time, many first-timers were enthusiastic, we successfully projected a unity of purpose and reported our operations and findings with candor and intelligence. We thus gave new life and credibility to the role of non-partisan volunteerism that, in its scale and quality, is uniquely Filipino.
This is what foreign observers missed who made crude judgments in two or three days of observation, such as in Pampanga, about whether our democracy was successfully upheld in the elections. They should have stayed long enough to witness how the people successfully asserted their sovereign will despite the shortcomings of the system and they would have understood why we believe that democracy, or what Vaclav Havel called the unfinished aspiration of a people, will continue to prevail in our country.
The Program of Action for the 2010 Elections
The first order of business is to write a thorough evaluation of the 2007 elections and a program of action on electoral reform agenda leading to the 2010 elections.
Since none of us here is in a position of authority to effect the institutional and legal reforms we want to take place, our task is most daunting. We have to really do our homework on the details of reform such as the features of automation, be relentless in our advocacy and be ready to make timely interventions on key events and processes. (For example, something as simple as congressional committee hearings - are we prepared to do the necessary research and to attend every one of those hearings?)
Number one on the reform agenda is the quality of the new appointments to the Comelec, particularly the Chair. For 150 days before and after elections, the Comelec Chair is the most powerful person in the country. Many good things follow from the appointment of good commissioners, not only in terms of independence and integrity, but in better management of the system. This is the critical test of the sincerity and commitment of the President (and the opposition) to electoral reform. Three of the seven members of the commission (the Chair has to be a lawyer) are allowed by the Constitution to be non-lawyers precisely to deal with such things as the modernization of the system.
Number two on the reform agenda is legislative reform where we must be prepared to be specific about the features and provisions of the law. I suggest the following in order of importance:
a) the automation law
b) the voter registration law which must be separately legislated from the automation law
c) the laws on campaign finance
d) the party-list system
e) the absentee voting law
f) procedural improvements or even just improvements in the IRR of the Comelec
Other legislative reforms which may be harder to push include:
d) anti-dynasty law
e) sectoral representation in the various sanggunians
f) turncoatism legislation
Number three on the reform agenda is the development of better relationships and clarification of roles among citizens arms and between the citizens arms and the Comelec. I believe that the church-based groups must agree as soon as possible on who does what. There is a long history of turf battles going back to 1992 when I first accredited PPCRV and Nassa as citizens arms. Before that Namfrel was accredited to do everything. I assumed they would find a way to work things out. Frankly, they did not, and the terms of cooperation for the 2007 elections was the best we could do under the circumstances. This must be done now.
With respect to the citizens arms and the Comelec, I believe that many of the conflicts are relationship rather than integrity problems, and can be solved by simply getting to know one another way ahead of the elections with common projects, like modernization, voter education and, what is most important to them, public and open support for Comelec people who refuse to play politics. This program of cooperation should be a nationwide undertaking. I have started to talk to the career staff and they are open to scheduling informal get-togethers, province by province, municipality by municipality on this agenda. This is a backbreaking project but it will yield huge dividends by 2010.
What are the chances of our succeeding in this agenda?
High if we are willing to do our part. Very high if, in addition, we get a really good Chair of the Comelec and at least one of the three other new commissioners. It is not enough, even meaningless, to make press statements about a selection process and enumerate criteria, that is now part of the rhetoric for reform. Also asking for the opposition to name one commissioner is self-defeating because the administration party will also want one and so will other partisans and so on and so forth. And we will end up with a conglomeration of partisans who are then expected to act in non-partisan manner. If the President asks if we have nominess, we must prepared give names. It is as simple as that. Otherwise, we lose by default and she will have an excuse to name nominees of personal advisers or worse of politicians. As to the Comelec bureaucracy, meaningful revamp is possible once that bureaucracy senses that the commission is a truly reform-minded commission and internal cooperation will follow. There are enough good people still within its ranks who are just waiting for the right leadership. And they know, more than anybody, what it takes to clean up the mess that Tancangco and Abalos are leaving behind.
Although still three years away, amending and implementing the automation law is no mean task. So is the rest of the legislative reform agenda. We are up against too many vested interests in Congress - ideological, political or just plain greed because a modernization program that represents high risks and high rewards across a wide range of motivations. We would need to organize ourselves into a tightly coordinated and focused advocacy to prevail against those odds.
I realize that all of us have our own advocacies, all of them urgent, all of them with long-term implications - human rights, militarization, agrarian reform, education, labor, environment, globalization, the economy and many others. Everything that is encapsulized in one phrase about social justice in Article XIII of the Constitution – equitably diffusing wealth and political power for the common good. Our plate is full, we may have to be selective about our cause, and just develop a support network for others. I hope that many of you will choose electoral reform because, very simply, there can be no real democracy without real elections. We also know that reform and change take time and require both resolve and endurance. We are here for the long-run.
The words of the assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador are instructive “....It helps now and then to step back and take the longer view....we plant seeds that one day will grow...we lay foundations that will need further development.....we are workers not master builders, we are ministers not messiahs, we are prophets of a future not our own…”
