Political rallies and elections in general are considered superspreader events in which a small number of people are able to infect a disproportionately large number of others. Research suggests, in fact, that superspreader events are most responsible for how far and how quickly the coronavirus has spread.  Imagine having one person with undiagnosed COVID19, attending a political rally and standing shoulder to shoulder with a group of other supporters, cheering loudly for a politician on stage. Even with masks on, it’s a scary scenario. And one that is likely to unfold in thousands of political rallies, indoor campaign events, and miting de avance-s nationwide unless we start accepting now that COVID-19 has re-written the rules of the game for us – our laws just don’t know it yet.

VOTER REGISTRATION

Voter registration – the entry level into the political world for everybody – cannot survive unaltered in the new world of COVID-19. The requirement that a registrant file an application in person, mandated in Republic Act 8189, gives rise to crowding at COMELEC offices and even at satellite registration sites; the biometrics requirement, under Republic Act 10367, apart from making it impossible for an applicant to avoid having to go in person, also contributes to the build up of people in the COMELEC office, especially as the deadline nears. To put it simply, the entire existing voter registration system forces us to do exactly what social distancing tells us not to do. The COMELEC’s efforts at relaunching iRehistro will help, but it may not go far enough. IRehistro, in a nutshell, is a way for registrants to go on-line, fill out the application form for registration, and print it out. The idea is that if applicants are able to print out an accomplished application form before they even go to the COMELEC office, then they get to reduce the time they spend outdoors and in harm’s way. In theory, at least, this is a good plan. The reality however, is a little more challenging. First of all, not everyone has access to a computer with a printer. Second, if you did have a printer, you would have to make sure that you use the correct kind of paper to print your form out on. Third, the fact that you still have to go to the COMELEC office anyway, means that you will still be exposed to the possibility of infection. Unfortunately, unless the personal appearance rule in Republic Act 8189 and the mandatory biometrics requirement under Republic Act 10367, are amended substantially, this is really the best that can be done.

CAMPAIGNING

The struggle to win votes in the Philippines remains largely an in-person affair, where politicians routinely get mobbed by supporters. Social distancing, after all, is a brand-new concept to the typical Filipino. With the coronavirus on the loose, however, things have to be drastically different. For starters, the precautionary measures we are now very familiar with – social distancing, the wearing of face coverings, and frequent hand hygiene – will inevitably put a damper on traditional forms of in-person campaigning. Political rallies and other mass gatherings will most likely be officially discouraged. In those few cases where they are held – assuming that people aren’t too scared to go to begin with – they will have to conform to social distancing guidelines. Political parades and caravans will probably also be officially discouraged. About the only thing that will survive the transition to a new normal of political campaigning will be posters and banners. And with recent amendments to the law increasing the spending limit of candidates, it is inevitable that posters and banners – already a perennial problem to police – will be even more widely used. But these traditional paper posters might just be getting some competition in 2022 as a bill, currently pending in Congress seeks the legitimization of the use of billboards – like the kind you now see lining EDSA – for political campaigning. Coming from more than 15 years of haranguing politicians and political parties for using posters in excess of the mandated maximum dimensions, the thought of seeing propaganda plastered across these massive billboards made me cringe. But the more I studied the arguments in favor of allowing billboards to be used for election propaganda, the more I came to realize that there was a good point being made. Apparently, as the proposal’s author put it, “the amount of contracting or leasing a billboard space is substantially lower compared to advertisement in radio or television or newspaper.” If that were so – and I have no reason to believe otherwise – then billboards do have the potential to be more easily accessible to a political candidate with limited funds. Of course, if billboards are legitimized for election propaganda purposes, it is highly probable that it won’t remain cheap for very long. To begin with, billboards are an inherently scarce resource; the number of available billboards is far lower than the number of candidates who might want to use them. The competition caused by this scarcity will drive up the cost of using the billboards, making it likely that they will quickly be priced out of the reach of candidates with small budgets, defeating the laudable objectives of the proposal. Apart from printed campaign materials, however, the fact remains that all other traditional avenues of campaigning are shrinking. And with broadcast advertising still costing as much as it does, we can expect that more political parties and candidates will be resorting to the use of social media and teleconferencing.

Social Media and Teleconferencing

Social media has been around for quite some time now, and it has proven to be a powerful tool for political campaigns. But social media’s greatest strength has, up to this point, been its ability to effectively mobilize partisans. Both in 2016 and in 2019, rallies were organized and coordinated using social media platforms. And recently, apps that focus on sharing ultra-short videos have gotten tremendous success as a means of capturing the attention of the public. As effective as these platforms are however, they address only one aspect of campaigning: the need to be build name and face recall. Communicating anything of substance is a challenge, to say the least, when you’re on a platform designed precisely to take advantage of short attention spans. This is where teleconferencing comes into its own. Prior to the pandemic, teleconferencing wasn’t really something that ordinary people would be aware of. The pandemic has changed that. With television stations and employers everywhere resorting to online apps that offer seamless teleconferencing to get around quarantine restrictions to productivity, words like Teams and Zoom are quickly becoming part of the popular lexicon. It is almost a certainty that this popularity will receive an even greater boost once the campaigns start in earnest. The ability to address large groups of people remotely – one teleconferencing service claims its meetings can include up to thousand participants – and still retain direct interaction with the audience is a game changer. And it’s cheap too. There is absolutely no question about it: the combined the mobilizing power of social media and the ability to have meaningful conversations via teleconferencing will define the new normal of election campaigns.

ELECTIONS

Ask anyone about the elections today, and they are likely to tell you “matagal pa yun.” And sure, as the crow flies, two years is till quite a way off. But when you’re talking about preparing for Presidential elections in the context of a pandemic, you very quickly realize that two years is literally just around the corner. Election day as we know it involves people standing in queues, touching writing desks in the polling place, and handling ballots in tiny crowded classrooms. In the last elections, However, we had 46,937,139 voters trooping to 85,769 clustered precincts, located in 36,830 voting centers, situated in 1,634 cities and municipalities nationwide. That translates to an average of 500 to 600 voters actually coming in and out of the polling places, with some reaching as high as 800. In other words, election day in the Philippines is a perfect place for community transmission. Under a new normal scenario election day might have to look drastically different.

Envisioning a new election day

In the interest of envisioning a possible new normal election day scenario, let’s leave aside for now the requirements of the Constitution and the need for COMELEC en Banc approval for policy matters. The most obvious difference would be that elections under the new normal might have to take place over a period of three days. This would allow us to bring the election day throng down to more manageable levels. Incidentally, the COMELEC is currently considering a similar solution for scheduled plebiscites taking place before 2022. Once the voters arrive at the polling centers – the school campuses where elections take place – they will be greeted by the sight of markers and cordons intended to enforce social distancing rules for the crowds waiting to take their turn to vote. In the polling places themselves – the classrooms where voting actually happens – voters will be greeted by the now familiar sight of plastic barriers, thermal scanners, more social distancing markers, and hand sanitation stations. Disposable face masks will be available for those who arrive without masks of their own. Voters will have to bring their own pens, with which they can sign the various documents – including the mandatory contact tracing forms – pushed by the face-masked Board of Election Inspectors through cut-outs in the plastic sheet. Taking the vision a step further, the COMELEC could partner with makers of mobile applications and telecoms companies to provide a more streamlined process of collecting contact tracing information via QR codes and mobile phones. This is already being done to varying degrees by some entities now, both public and private, and with two years to go, it is not impossible for the COMELEC to do the same. Voters will then take their ballot to the voting area where they will occupy socially distanced seats. Once they’re done voting, they approach the vote counting machine that, as usual, occupies the center of the room. Without touching the VCM, the voters will insert their ballots and await the voter receipt that the machine prints out. Once they’re done inspecting the voter receipt, they exit from the polling station, dropping their used face masks into the designated trash bin.

Reality Check

This speculative vision for safe elections in 2022 is an ideal scenario – one that doesn’t not take into consideration Constitutional limitations on when to hold elections, and takes for granted that everything needed to make the elections as safe as possible will be approved and adequately funded. However, with a projected voting population of approximately 65 million voters in 2022, with each precinct serving an average of 800 voters throughout election day, it is practically inevitable for even these best case scenario preparations to be overwhelmed. A better solution, by far, would be to combine these health precautions with measures designed to bring down even further the number of people going to polling places to cast their ballots. We need to find ways to get people to cast their ballots without making them come to the polling places. Congress has stepped up to this challenge. They are now tackling proposed legislation that will bring vulnerable sectors within the coverage of alternative voting methods like absentee voting and voting-by-mail. While this is an admirable start, there are those who think that unless these alternative methods are made available to all voters, then the proposed solution just isn’t going far enough. For some, the only viable solution is online voting. The COMELEC has been exploring online voting since at least 2007. Around that time, the COMELEC even pilot tested an online voting system in a non-binding election. The pilot test was widely considered a success, but the legislative mill has yet to turn out an online voting law. In any case, even if Congress were to pass a law today that mandates online voting, two years would be far too short for everything that would need doing. As it is, it takes the COMELEC more than eight months just to get the Automated Election System certified and we’ve been using the AES since 2010; imagine how long it would take to get a brand-new and untested system up and running. Even if we somehow managed to do it, the rushed implementation would inevitably draw much criticism, both deserved and undeserved. This makes the current bills expanding the alternative voting modes to vulnerable sectors the only ready-to-go solution that could realistically be made to work within the next two years. But if absentee voting and voting-by-mail are going to be significant alternatives in 2022 – and they should be if we don’t want to risk low voter turn-outs or high COVID-19 transmission rates – there would be much to re-tool in the existing election system. For both absentee and postal voting, the biggest challenge is one of credibility. Since the automated elections of 2010, people have gotten more and more impatient with delays – as they should be – in announcing the final election results. Unfortunately, existing absentee and postal voting protocols require ballots to lay uncounted for the duration of the voting period – anywhere from two weeks to a whole month. It is difficult to see how such a scenario would be acceptable to a voting public already predisposed to believing that the fix is in. For postal voting in particular, the most serious concern is making sure that ballots are sent to their intended recipients reliably and on time. Despite herculean efforts by the Postal System, it seems that this remains a significant challenge.

A NEW NORMAL

In the late 1990s, the COMELEC confronted another great threat to our democratic process – electoral fraud – by demonstrating audacity in proposing the full automation of the electoral system, despite conventional wisdom saying that we were not ready for it. The COMELEC then persevered in its vision and, with determination, shepherded the country’s transition to full automation in 2010. Since then, our elections have enjoyed great credibility among both our voters and in the international election community. The COMELEC can do it again. This time, against the coronavirus. Even the most optimistic projections tell us that COVID19 will remain a major threat to us for a very long time, impacting the way we live and do things. By scaring people into staying home and staying apart, COVID19 will be directly contributing to lower political participation and low voter turn outs at a time when the voice of the people needs to be heard the most. The burden is now on the COMELEC to fight back against the chilling effect of COVID19 – to end the state of electoral lockdown – by devising ways through which the public can continue participating in our democratic process with minimal risk to their health. And in this struggle, the COMELEC will need the full measure of audacity it showed when it first proposed using vote counting machines before the turn of the century. But more than that, the COMELEC will need to have the vision to see beyond existing structures, to comprehend what is possible with modern technology, and to map out a future for an electoral process that is impervious to pandemic.