Dishonest electorate makes dishonest candidates or vice-versa?
This is a proverbial chicken-and-egg dilemma. Do crooked politicians cause the electorate to become crooked? Or, is it the electorate which is crooked first, who would necessarily and expectedly give birth to a crooked officialdom? If and when we ask traditional politicians why they are allocating millions in funds to buy votes, they would answer that vote-buying would be the only peaceful way to win an electoral contest in the Philippines, because they look at the people as corrupt and see them also as wanting to be corrupted. The whole system stinks, whoever is the chicken and whoever is the egg becomes irrelevant.
On the other hand, the voters would retort that they would not be in a situation where they have to sell their votes if there were no buyers. They believe, and perhaps rightly so, that these dirty politicians only remember them during election season. And so, the voters might as well opt for a few hundreds or few thousands of pesos in exchange for their votes. Then the politicians would no longer have the obligation to serve the people because they have already paid them. This is the kind of social cancer that Rizal wrote about more than a century ago in his immortal “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo.” Until now the cancer continues to make the people suffer, and every election is just a stage to further exacerbate the malignant cells of corruptions and misdeeds perpetrated and perpetuated by both the voters and those who are voted upon.
We have a morally sick human society that is too driven by money and other material things. This fixation on material possessions especially in a situation of extreme poverty and endemic social injustice cannot just be blamed on the people’s lack of strong moral fiber. This is largely pushed by the struggle to survive. Five hundred pesos paid by a politician to a voter could already buy more than ten kilos of rice. The people do not think of good manners and right values when their stomachs are aching due to hunger. We do not seek to justify the acts of receiving money from candidates, but if this money can buy medicine for a sick child or food for a starving, homeless family, who are we to condemn them?
The burden of guilt and crisis of conscience should be heavier on the part of the politicians who are buying votes. For to whom much has been given, definitely, much should be expected. These rich, influential, and socially and economically strong trapos should be the ones to get most of the blame for the corruption in our electoral system. They are the ones guilty of the “Hello Garci” kind of unduly twisting of the arms of the Commission on Elections, by pesos or by power pressure. They are the ones capable of manipulating the Smartmatic counting machines. Not the poor voters. Well, they too are not with clean hands. But the heavier guilt is in the side of the stronger party. The fault is more on the chicken and less on the egg.
It is useless to debate on who started to corrupt whom, the voter or the dirty politician. The better thing to do is to start thinking about how to dismantle all mechanisms of electoral corruption. If it takes another century, and another Rizal, we should all be ready to be shot in Luneta again, if only to save this nation from the social cancer that ails it and makes the people suffer for too long and so much.
‘These strong trapos should get most of the blame for the corruption in
our electoral system.’