War is over, but not the Battle

By midnight on May 12, we expect that all will be quiet and calm – no more blaring loudspeakers with tired political jingles, no more annoying TV and radio commercials, and no more boring speeches of politicians courting our precious votes. By that time there will be no more printed campaign materials littering our streets and backyards. By that time only tweeting birds, singing crickets, croaking frogs, crowing roosters, barking dogs, pounding carpenters’ hammers and children’s laughter will reverberate in our otherwise quiet neighborhood.

We are glad the war of all the political candidates to win our hearts and minds is over. It’s time for all of us to rest from all the noise pollution of campaign promises, which didn’t only deafen our ears but also nagged us to death. It’s time no more papers are wasted on campaign materials so we can save on trees. It is better that these papers be used for our school children’s textbooks in June.

But while the war of our political candidates -- be they losers or winners -- is over, our battle as citizens will again begin. Our battle starts on the day of election. The battle starts from our choices as we enter the voting precincts. Making a choice is sometimes a tyranny in itself because we are forced to choose from among lesser evils, not from among good men and women, who are as rare as the monkey-eating eagle.

After we made our choices, we are asked to guard our ballots. We are asked to keep vigil over the counting and canvassing of our votes. So we are asked not to sleep until we are assured that our votes are counted correctly. Why? Can’t the commission mandated to count our votes master their simple arithmetic? Don’t they know their addition? They don’t have to solve algebra or trigonometry problems, do they?

There was this effort to computerize our electoral process. But the election commission screwed up the effort towards computerization. It wanted to stick to the antiquated manual counting, which is vulnerable to dagdag-bawas (vote-padding) anomalies.

We had learned about bad precedents, which continue to haunt, hound and threaten our so-called democracy. The ghost of the “hello Garci” fiasco has yet to be exorcised. So we are asked to watch out and guard against this ghost.

And granting that our votes are correctly counted, we are also asked to do another task: to monitor whether or not our elected officials fulfill the promises they made before us when they were politely but persistently courting our votes. Some of them may even have signed covenants arranged by church and civil society leaders.

For us, ordinary citizens, the war won’t be over after May 14. For us, the war continues and so we have to always gear up for battle in this country, which is still a babe in the woods in terms of democracy.