Quality voters a must

The Philippines has been suffering an endless hunger for clean governance and wise leadership. Isn’t there anybody in the present dispensation who can stand up and do something about the malaise while they can, before the 2016 elections?

Why do our “laws” freely allow crooks, robbers, goons, plunderers, dynasts and morons to be elected into public office by letting naïve, gullible people to vote and to be exploited in the process? Is it a wonder that this suffering sector of our society is helplessly prone to electioneering as it is hardly aware of the real, deep and key issues involved in electing the right leaders to move the nation forward? Aren’t their votes exactly the reason why they remain poor?

Will we ever wake up to the reality that no amount of effort to educate voters would be sufficient to counter massive ignorance? Why must an election be a “circus” or tragic drama? Why don’t we set appropriate qualification requirements—beyond the blood that runs in the veins and the brown color of the skin—for every Filipino to deserve the right to vote?

Talk about a big, single chunk of “qualified” voters and they are the ones whose votes can be readily swayed by self-serving politicians through bribe money, freebies, lies, “portrayals” and popularity. They have the numbers that seem to always determine the outcome of every election. Thus vote-buying, “pambobola,” mudslinging, campaign over-spending, ballot-snatching, killings and violence are rampant during election seasons. And
the country normally ends up “electing” the wrong people.

Then we lament why there’s no solution to injustice, poverty, criminality and wanton corruption in government amid great hunger and illiteracy. This is not democracy. This is stupidity. Is there a way to harmonize the call to “vote wisely” and the laws that negate that very same call?

This is not to deprive anybody of the right to vote. This is to deprive the opportunistic, avaricious hoodlums and “undesirables” of the chance to win in an election, if there’s no way our inutile laws can render these crooks ineligible to run for any national or local office.

This is to bestow democratic right to the downtrodden; the right to be truly served and freed from their abject plight and from themselves.

But this is not to encourage some purely “ambitious” souls who have been doing poorly in surveys. I don’t mind if we’ll have again a woman president after next year’s elections.

May the pleadings of this piece merit some public musing and action (with urgency) on the part of our officials in the three branches of government and on the part of those who have the moral ascendancy to effect transformation. The poor need leaders, not “politicians” who use and abuse them.
Revise the statutes or repulse progress.

—RENI M. VALENZUELA, [email protected]