Filipinos love to vote

It never gets old. The sights awaiting us at polling centers on Election Day are a bracing testimony to the vigor of our democracy. Whatever is said about Filipinos, it is clear that Filipinos love to vote.

Maybe it’s the “fiesta mentality,” the eagerness to participate in a festive occasion, marked by hoopla and noise, and anticipatory antics months before the occasion itself. The campaign sorties, rallies, debates and heated discussions on corner stores, civic assemblies and even TV studios served as appetizers, whetting our curiosity, our excitement, our patriotism, our love for country.

Oh yeah?—the skeptics might scoff. Not all voters are motivated by such noble or naïve sentiments. Maybe one reason voters braved the queues at various precincts, and the rain, heat, congestion, impatience and full bladders, was an eagerness to cash in on the exercise, with rumors of vote-buying in various sites around the country fueling suspicions about the reliability of the election results.

A friend tells me about a common sight on the streets of her city many elections back. She used to be puzzled at the number of people milling about the streets on the eve of Election Day. That is, until she ran for a local office herself, and was told that vote-buying took place the night before the polls opened, with the votes going to the “highest bidder” or the “last touch,” or the candidate or party that last negotiated with the voters.

But while I would not discount the impact of vote-selling and vote-buying on the results of the elections—it still could, especially at the local level, determine the winners—I still believe the great majority of Filipino voters do their civic duty out of a sense of obligation and a desire to participate in a grand, nationwide festivity.

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To be sure, every election has serious aspects. And of course I do not mean to demean the deaths of many—candidates as well as election officials, including teachers—in the course of their participation in these elections.

Compared to previous electoral exercises, though, the level of electoral violence and intimidation has receded somewhat. There are few, if any, reports of violence on the scale of the burning of entire barangays in Ilocos Sur in the late 1960s. Or of the assassination of a candidate, most memorably Evelio Javier, in the course of a campaign. Still, “election-related” shootings, beatings and intimidation still take place, if random reports are to be believed.

So the best that can be said of Philippine elections, and thus, democracy, is that such incidents indicate a “work in progress,” a country and populace getting more and more comfortable with the open, transparent and accountable exercise of electoral power, despite many glitches that attend its conduct.

Modernization, computerization in particular, has not settled completely all the anxieties and doubts that political parties, candidates (especially losing ones) and voters harbored about the conduct of supposedly “free and fair” elections. But we are getting there, albeit with a few stumbles along the way.

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One of the more urgent steps we need to take now is ensuring truly “inclusive” elections, bringing the blessings of democracy not just to the poor and those living in the most isolated spots, but to those “handicapped” in their full exercise of citizenship.

Among those interviewed in the course of TV coverage of yesterday’s voting was Carmen Reyes Zubiaga, executive director of the National Council on Disability Affairs (NCDA), who spoke on the plight of “disenfranchised” voters with disability. Despite numerous meetings with Commission on Elections officials and even a signed agreement, Zubiaga said the Comelec failed to implement many of the provisions in their agreement. For instance, said Zubiaga, many voters with disabilities were turned away, or left in disappointment, when they found out that their precincts were located on the second or third floors of public schools, making voting literally inaccessible to them.

Zubiaga mentioned an agreement with Comelec that would have ensured that voters with disabilities would be accommodated in precincts on the ground floor, or else their ballots would be brought down to them, where they could be assisted in filling out their ballots.

Incredibly, another guest, retired Comelec commissioner Rene Sarmiento, explained that the poll body had surveyed various polling centers in the country and found out that only two precincts outside Manila had “large enough populations of disabled voters.” The Comelec thus decided, Sarmiento said, that there was no need to carry out many of the provisions of the agreement with the NCDA. To this Zubiaga protested that their office was not informed of this decision beforehand.

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Listening to the exchange of views, I was myself gobsmacked. Only two precincts had sufficient number of people with disability to warrant that steps be taken to ensure inclusive elections?

As I wrote previously in this space, the United Nations estimates that in any population, about 10 percent would consist of people with disabilities. In our country, with a population of between 90 million and 100 million, there should be between nine million and 10 million Filipinos with disabilities. Where did the Comelec go looking for PWDs? And even if there was just one Filipino voter with disability, wouldn’t he or she still deserve special treatment as a citizen?

All of us, we must remember, are headed toward a life of disability, if not now, then later when illness and age take their toll. That is why all of us have a stake in disability issues, and forging an inclusionary society is just the beginning.