Philippine Election 2010 - Now that's what I call an election!

Philippine Election Poster taken from www.2010PhilippineElection.com (without permission)

The Philippines is an Archipelago made up of 7107 islands. Spread across 2000 of these islands is the world’s 12th largest population (approximately 97 million people). 11 million of these citizens form the Diaspora who live abroad in countries like the United States where they make up the second largest immigrant population, or in Canada where they make up the first largest immigrant population. Thanks to a 45 year American occupation following the Spanish - American war, most Filipinos speak English as a second language. The remainder will get by on their first language which could be any one of 111 dialects spoken in the country.

One can only imagine the challenges of conducting a national election in a country with these statistics. Well, yesterday they attempted to do just that: 50 million registered voters voted for any of 87000 candidates running in 17000 positions.

This task would be challenging under the best of conditions. Unfortunately, the people here have rarely if ever had the best of election conditions. “The government is perceived as among the worlds most corrupt, according to Transparency International, an NGO addressing corruption, and other watchdogs.” (Lonely Planet). Supporting this claim is a history that includes the world’s first bloodless coup in 1986 when the People Power revolution overthrew Ferdinand Marcos (whose wife, at 80, is now running for a seat in congress). The people repeated this exercise again in 2001 when they deposed President Joseph Estrada (an ex film star who is again running for President). Further, 30 people have been killed in election related violence in the run up to this election.

So you have a really complicated, really fragile political system – let’s not try anything extraordinary like, for example, overhauling the entire election system…Right? Wrong. This is in effect what they have decided to do. In one election, they moved from manual ballots where you wrote the name of the candidate you support on a piece of paper, to a fully automated electronic system. Computers work fine nowadays right? This should be fine? I mean, after all we are located in Southeast Asia, not far from China, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore where the majority of all computers are made. Sorry again. A last minute test showed the machines did not count the votes properly. This saw a frantic last minute push to update memory cards in the 70,000 voting machines (again spread across the archipelago). This resulted in calls by the “Concerned Citizen’s Movement” (CCM) led by former President Estrada to suspend automation and shift to a manual counting. The current President’s spokesperson supported this for a brief moment but later recanted.

Not all is rotten though: reportedly the memory cards have been replaced; 364 foreign observers have been accredited to monitor the elections as well as 159 foreign journalists; and 3664 teachers have been mobilized for a manual vote audit. Further, a liquor ban has been put on to prevent candidates from plying voters with drinks. For now, it is too early to tell how things will fall out. As I mentioned before though, few are concerned with who gets elected as long as someone clearly does.

Best for now,

Luke