Vote buying

Dear Ms. Monteagudo,

I hope you don’t mind if I call you Gianna. You, in turn, would oblige me very much if you called me James.

With that important business out of the way, your question is “Does the COMELEC have plans for preventing vote-buying from being inevitable during elections?”

The short answer is: YES. Voter Education will be used to address the perennial ill of vote-buying, hopefully by molding a generation of voters who appreciate their vote so much that they won’t be willing to sell it.

The pragmatic answer is: while the short answer is accurate enough, it doesn’t really answer your question. Unfortunately, if I were to take on your question strictly by its own terms, i would have to say that there is simply no way we can prevent the inevitability of vote-buying.

Vote buying, you see, is economic behavior. And with many of our voters being so poor, acts with economic benefits trump those acts that are more noble or altruistic. Simply put, many of our voters commoditize their votes because it brings more immediate benefits than voting your conscience.

What the COMELEC can do is to improve the mechanisms for reporting vote-buying. To be perfectly candid with you, I still don’t have a complete picture of how that can be done. But I have to believe that it can be done. Early in this election cycle, I thought that citizen journalist groups like Boto Mo, I-patrol Mo represented a glimmer of hope – a way of possibly making it easier to report vote-buying operations (incidentally, vote buying operations are usually large scale activities involving lots of campaign workers knocking on doors and giving money), but throughout the run up to the polls, I never saw any usable report on vote-buying ops.

Still, citizen journalism is probably the way to go. All we have to do is figure out how to keep the citizen journalists safe.

Whew. I bet that answer was much longer than absolutely necessary. Still, I hope it helps.

James

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