Election Day, May 12 is tomorrow – our midterm elections 2025. And I for one, will be happy when it’s all over, and we can go back to everyday life. Let’s be honest, more often than not, we don’t even get excited over midterm elections. For the jaded observers, they’re just a changing of the guard, or a ceremonial passing of the torch; an insider party among political cohorts and confederates. For the super-jaded and cynical, they’re just the periodic non-Presidential opportunity to revitalize the local economy, via cash liquidity.

But this 2025 is different. Since last year, we could see the writing on the wall, the battle lines being drawn – Pro Marcos or Pro-Duterte, and the steady proliferation of fake news and mud-slinging. The digital age, and the popularity of social media, has resulted in a democratization of getting the news out there, but that has its up side, and sad to say, down side as well – and the prevailing million-dollar question is “What qualifies as ‘news’ today?” If something patently false is said with conviction enough times, does it qualify to become the “truth” of today? Or a perception of it, that so many subscribe to out of ignorance, whether willful or not?

One more day, and all our efforts behind the Manila Bulletin campaign of Matalinong Boto 2025 will be part of our past, our legacy, for the year. This year, we embarked on the campaign with three pillars attached to the notion of Matalinong Boto. The three pillars were No to election violence, No to mud-slinging and character assassination, and No to fake news. And we actively sought academic institutions to partner with us, and pledge to these three pillars. It was especially important to create this grass roots/community aspect to the campaign, as it’s their future that these new voters are going to the polls to decide on. And we did want them as aware, informed, and knowledgeable as possible.

I had the opportunity to represent the Manila Bulletin at the Campus Patrol event of ABS News at STI Cainta. And this was something I was especially honored to do, to talk in front of some 300 students, offer some insights into the midterm elections, and lead them in reciting our MB Matalinong Boto pledge.

At STI, in the course of the short talk I gave, I asked the students if they already had their choice for party list. Asking them to raise their hands, I was genuinely surprised to find no more than two responded. Realizing that these would generally be neophyte voters, I then asked them if they knew what the party list system was all about – and to be honest, I could detect from most of their reactions that they just weren’t thinking party list at all – and that is disturbing, an indictment of how well we prepare these young voters. And conversely, why this party list system, that actually seats 20 percent of our House of Representatives is so often described as being taken advantage of, being misused and abused.

Would it surprise you to learn that in the Party List voting of 2019 (our last midterm election) 41 percent of the votes cast were left blank or declared void because of some anomaly like shading more than one party list. In 2022, that figure slightly improved to 34 percent. But that is indicative of just how many in our voting population don’t bother at all, or do not have a strong notion on how to participate in party list voting.

During a recent Sunday lunch, I asked my sons about party list voting; and my youngest, who voted for the first time in 2022, admitted that he had ignored the party list section of the ballot. But he did know that he was allowed to vote for only one party.

Those dismal statistics about party list voting highlight just how easy it is to manipulate the system for the purposes of perpetuating power cliques, political families, and nepotism. I’ve heard that the interest groups who create the parties even horse-trade their list of nominees; using the argument that it’s cheaper to become a nominee, than to run your own traditional campaign. This is turning inside out the original intent of the framers of our Constitution, who saw the party list as a means to give the disenfranchised, social causes, and the less financially endowed, a way to still gain representation, and have a voice in Congress.

Other academic partners that we’ve engaged in with Matalinong Boto 2025 include the University of Santo Tomas, Far Eastern University, National University, Colegio de San Juan de Letran, Pamantasan Ng Lungsod Ng Maynila, Adamson University, UST-Legazpi, Albay, and De La Salle University. I’m especially thankful to these partners, and for how enthusiastically they responded to our request to “engage.”

May tomorrow’s voting lead to a better Philippines. The extreme polarization and divisiveness of our current political spectrum has only one big loser, and that’s us as a nation. How we progress as a people, how the rest of the world perceives us – that’s all held back, and/or compromised, by this stupid situation we’re in.