May 9, 2022. Today, some 67 million Filipino voters take to the polls. The people will cast their ballots for the stewardship of the country for the next six years. Passions are high and dreams of a better tomorrow are at stake.

There are a total of about 16,000 national and local posts that need to be filled. These include the President and Vice President, 12 senatorial seats, 316 seats to the House of Representatives, 81 governors and vice governors, 146 city mayors and vice mayors, 1,488 municipal mayors and vice mayors and thousands of members to provincial boards, city and municipal councils. With these number of positions to be filled, the number of candidates are easily multiplied three, four, five times.

For President alone, there are 10 registered candidates. For Vice President, there are seven running for the post. Making up one’s mind on who to vote for is certainly not an easy task. The lack of a strong party system adds to the difficulty, too, because it is that much harder to discern among the candidates when they have largely overlapping positions on issues and policy.

Getting to know the candidates was also a daunting feat for the average Juan or Juana de la Cruz. Political rallies are one avenue to get to know candidates. Despite strict guidelines by the Commission on Elections on the holding of rallies, they seem to have been used without much supervision.
But rallies are not exactly the best source of information for a person to get to know a candidate better.

By the very nature of rallies, candidates pander to the crowd. They generally espouse what the audience wants to hear. They get away with this because of the lack of a party platform to constrict their stance. If a town lacks accessibility, they were promised roads and bridges. If the province had lots of farmers, they were promised subsidies and best prices. If a community had lots of children, they were promised schools. And if a city had lots of senior citizens, they were promised hospitals and medical privileges. There was nothing wrong with all those, per se; however, a party platform would have also needed to address the broader issue of how these increases in government spending would be funded – especially since our national debt rose significantly as a result of borrowings for Covid-related programs.

So, if rallies were not enough to get to know a candidate, voters were probably driven to town hall discussions – virtual or otherwise, in social media or televised debates. Here, they hoped to have heard more in depth about a candidate’s thoughts and plans for the next six years. Clearly, one candidate had an immovable position against attending debates and, it seems, managed to get away with it. The command of and “artistry” in social media also divided many candidates. The supposed proliferation of fake news and use of trolls tarnished the credibility of many online platforms. Fact-checking sites were inundated and, themselves, attacked. By its nature, social media does not allow a candidate to “talk” to the people; there are simply too many sites. They need an army of online warriors to man the (on)lines. Of course, you would think that any official posts are approved by the candidate but it’s also likely that many are not. To be sure, I have hesitated to take anything on social media as gospel truth.

In the end, how well did we prepare ourselves for this day? I think that many of us will go by with what our hearts tell us. We listened to family, friends and peers. We discussed, often to the brink of fist-a-cuffs and unfollowing each other on social media. We did our research, read reports and reflected on the issues that matter most to us.

Hopefully, this election is not just a matter of who we do not want to win but more about what kind of future we want to build for ourselves and those who will come after us. It’s not about popularity or name recall but looking for and voting into office the next generation of leaders who will take our country – and the Filipino people – forward.

I believe that this election is about how we will continue to fight the good fight – our good fight – no matter who wins this election. Election day is not the end of the journey that we started just a few months ago; it is just the beginning of making sure that the reasons we went to the polls become a reality with whoever wins, whether it is our chosen candidate or not.

Today, election day, we are voting to keep fighting for the Philippine nation, no matter the winner. Ultimately, it comes down to the why of the elections, not the who. We must endure. And we must safeguard the peaceful transition of government as enshrined in our constitution.                                                                                                                                                   

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