Three more Mondays and 54.4-million voters will troop to polling precincts—92, 500 clustered ones as of latest count.
If Comelec’s roster of voters were a country, it would rank as the world’s 24th most populous, bigger even than South Korea which is home to 49.2-million souls.
Voting will stretch for 11 hours, with the army of watchers and teachers all up on their feet by dawn and all hoping that they’d be Cinderellas— home before the clock strikes midnight.
Some will be burning the midnight oil, literally, as the betting is that the ongoing power outages in Mindanao, at the rate lamps there are flickering like Christmas lights, would continue until election day.
On this, smart alecks who inhabit Facebook are having a heyday poking fun on the DOE-term for lack of power—Yellow Alert—which they say can also be applied to the anxious state of the party donning that color.
Like many Filipinos, I couldn’t wait for the counting to be over and done with. We have invested so much time and energy in hearing the spiels and spins of a quarter-a-million applicants for 18,000 casual jobs.
Money which should have gone to schools and hospitals are being spent to police the campaign, and tally the votes.
Taxpayers are coughing up P16 billion for Comelec’s operations this year, when two national elections will be held, the second one for barangay officials in the last quarter.
If we don’t want squander precious resources on what is basically a raucous triennial job fair to hire 18,000 elective officials, most of whom will be awarded three-year job contracts, then we must muster will to reform the way they are hired.
First is to cut the lengthy campaign period, from 90 days to 45 days for presidential, VP and senatorial candidates. Slash, too, the window for local candidates to buy votes from 45 days to 30 days.
This courtship calendar was conceived during the pre-Internet age, before the cellphone explosion, when candidates have to leapfrog from one entablado to another to be heard and seen, when exposure was reckoned in the number of babies kissed, instead of YouTube views.
Second is to trim the party-list clutter. The cost that comes with electing them is astounding. Proof is the space they hog in the ballot which now has more entries than a restaurant menu.
There is cost not just in the acquisition of their mandates but also, and higher, in the exercise of their mandates. Their perks are equal to entitlements district congressmen enjoy.
Besides, the economic background of the present crop of so-called marginalized representatives radically departs from the original intent of the framers of the basic law, as an affirmative action that will install descamisados into the corridors of power.
Third is to put the bureaucracy on a diet, by subjecting the galaxy of elective posts to a slimming regimen.
By one estimate, just cutting by one, just one, the number of seats in all legislative bodies, from the Senate to the House to provincial boards to city councils to town sanggunians, will result in annual savings of P4 billion.
This estimate does not include how much will be saved if barangay councils pruned their membership by just one.
We should also put a stop to the congressional hobby of further dividing political subdivisions. More towns and provinces created mean more seats to be filled and paid.
The last time the United States admitted a state into the union was in 1959, when Hawaii became the 50th star on the Stars and Stripes.
At that time—56 years and seven presidents ago—Cotabato was one province—so were Davao, Surigao. Today, Cotabato has been cut up into five. Davao was halved, then quartered, now it has a newborn fifth offspring, which goes by the name of Davao Occidental (to add to its Oriental, Norte, Sur, thus completing the wind vane pointers, and Compostela Valley).
Nationally, we have a bifurcated Congress, with 24 senators duplicating the job of 297 congressmen, making it a bipolar institution sometimes, 81 provinces, 114 cities, 1,496 towns, 42,028 barangays, and one regional government on its death throes.
As a result we have to stage elections every 1,000 days to refill the natural bloat of these offices, like the one three Mondays from now to choose a president and the spare (or flat) tire, 12 senators, 297 congressmen, 81 governors and 81 vice governors, 772 provincial board members.
Also in the ballot are 144 city mayors and 144 vice mayors; and 1,496 town mayors and the same number of deputies; and 11,924 city town and town council seats.
The count and the cost of both money and human lives, however, do not end there.
There will be an October sequel to the May polls, this time for about 672,000-plus barangay posts: 42,208 chairmen, 294,196 barangay councilmen, and, because we train our politicos young, the same number of SK seats.
So, if we want to economize and convert payroll into public services, then we should study the possibility of merging provinces, cities, towns, barangays. And downsizing Congress.
If mergers in the world of business are the route to organizational efficiency and cost reduction, I don’t see why this can’t be applied to governance.