On vote buying
AS ELECTION day nears, the noise on the price for votes have been the talk in the corners of our streets. I was told by my staff that in this province local bets vying for executive posts are willing to pay P500 for each registered voter just to secure their winning. On midterm elections such as this, a voter could receive as much as 1 thousand pesos from all the candidates who buy votes.
While P500 pesos may seemed too cheap and too small a price, it is already enough for an underpaid worker to forget what little political ideologies he may have. It is enough to sustain a poor family for a week. And for a family with 4 registered voters, it would mean good food for the whole month. For someone who does not feel any difference with the effects of choosing from amongst the list of candidates it would be a heartbeat choice. Time and again, it has always boiled to that.
And while we feel almost helpless on such situation, there is no reason to give up hope. Change may not happen in this election, but the least we could do is to push people to reflect on the implications of such political phenomenon.
Vote buying has a two-fold reality. I just painted the first one above wherein the voters get to patronize such practice for very obvious practical reasons. They just can’t wait for the reforms that are being advocated by running politicians who are not even sure to win while their stomachs are empty today. Survival is a basic instinct.
The other side of such coin is that the running politicians (both the good and the not so good) are pressured to engage in such activity since it is the only way to secure their victory. They would not have bothered to run if they were not planning to win at all. An insider even told me that it would now cost about P200 million for a local political party to have a straight win in a highly urbanized city. With such, every running politician is asked to contribute to raise such amount. And since some do not have the resources, they resort to “solicitation” wherein they solicit money from local businessmen who would eventually have to deal with them once they’re in office. The businessmen are then either compelled to support them in fear that their business might not have the support and protection of the government after the election or they find such practice an opportunity to invest hoping that the money they’ll give will multiply once the politicians they are supporting would win.
The bitter implications on this are that by the time the politicians sit in office, (1) they could no longer say “no” to whatever favor these businessmen asks from them, (2) they would be busy paying off all kinds of debts to people whose interests are more personal than societal, and (3) they would be occupied on activities that will secure them in the next election.
As for the voters, they would be left with no one to fight for their welfare since they have already sold such multi-million government budgets supposedly intended for them for the sum of P500.
But what can we do? The percent of registered voters who are ready to sell their votes far exceed those who want a clean and honest election. This culture has even penetrated the educated ones. Such political phenomenon suggests strongly that indeed democracy only works in an intelligent population. In this case, I want to be very wrong, but I doubt it.*