Legitimacy

The recent initiative of Senator Grace Poe in her case now pending in the Supreme Court to inhibit the three justices who had voted against her in the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET), indicate that her camp is in a win-at-all-cost mode in the coming presidential elections. While this move is understandable, it could pose serious problems later on for a Grace Poe administration, in the event she wins the presidency. Specifically, it could raise problems about the legitimacy of a Poe government.

At the moment, there will be 14 member justices in the Supreme Court who will decide her case. Inhibiting the three justices who had voted against Poe in the SET, will leave 11 voting justices. If Poe wins her case on a split 6-5 vote, this means that she actually won with only a minority of the present members of the Supreme Court. Actually, the vote should be 8-6 against her if the votes of the three recused justices are counted. For her victory to be conclusive and non-controversial, she must win by an 8-3 vote (that is the absolute majority ) of the justices who voted on the issue.

A Poe administration will thus be starting with a double whammy. One serious fault of our present Constitution is that we have a multi-party system, but we have no provision for a run-off election. A run-off election (a contest between the two candidates with the highest number of votes in the initial balloting ), insures that the president thus elected will have a popular mandate from the majority of the population. Two countries which recently held run-off elections are Chile and Indonesia.

Under our present system, all the presidents we had elected since the onset of the 1987 Constitution, are minority presidents getting only a plurality of the votes. So from the political side, a Poe administration like its predecessors, will have no popular mandate. Now, the problem could get worse since from the judicial and legal point of view, a Poe administration will also actually have no imprimatur to govern if the view of the majority of the Supreme Court is taken into account.

Let us all hope that the Supreme Court vote decisively on this matter and not by a split decision. We cannot afford an unstable government, suffering from lack of legitimacy, running our country. Looking towards the future, it is time we also junk the hastily drafted 1987 Constitution with all the faults of a rush job. We could be the only multi-party government in the world without any run-off election. We should restore the two-party system if we do not want to have run-off elections.