DAVAO—There are two postponement initiatives taking aim at the 2017 barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections. The first originated with President Duterte and was subsequently taken up by the House of Representatives. This is the initiative that says the 2017 barangay and SK elections ought to be postponed because, well, drugs. Right now, the House of Representatives is proposing that the barangay and SK elections be moved to May 2018, while the Senate has yet to weigh in on the issue.
The other postponement initiative comes from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) itself. Acting on the possibility that no law will be passed postponing the barangay and SK elections, the Comelec is now looking to exercise its authority—given under the Omnibus Election Law—to suspend the holding of an electoral exercise when (and I’m paraphrasing here) the conditions for free and fair elections don’t exist. For the most part, this power is activated to suspend elections in areas hit by natural disasters, although, sometimes, it’s the shenanigans of men that make it necessary—for example: Marawi City.
These two postponement initiatives are currently going through what I can only call preparatory phases. The first one needs a law to be passed; the other—the Comelec one—needs a definite ruling from the Comelec’s governing body, the Commission en banc; a decision that can only be reached after holding a public hearing on the matter.
And that’s what the Comelec did in Davao earlier this week. The Commission en banc flew off to Davao and conducted a public hearing on the fate of the 2017 barangay and SK elections. The Commission en banc—represented by Chairman Andres D. Bautista and commissioners Christian Lim, Luie Guia and Al Parreño—started the proceedings by clearly setting out why the hearing was called to begin with: to solicit both information and opinion that would aid the Commission en banc in determining whether elections should be held in Mindanao, in view of the conditions and circumstances that gave rise to the declaration of martial law.
Ideally, the responses should have contributed to the proving or disproving of the notion that there exists (as provided for in the Omnibus Election Code) “cause, such as violence, terrorism, loss or destruction of election paraphernalia or records, force majeure and other analogous causes of such a nature that the holding of a free, orderly and honest election should become impossible in any political subdivision”.
As it turned out—rather disappointingly—the manifestations made by those in attendance tended only to be affirmations of a desire to postpone the elections.
Eight people representing various groups from all over Mindanao didn’t really speak to the necessity for suspension; they merely voiced their agreement to the oft-repeated line about suspension being necessary for winning the “war on the drugs”—the rationalization being used in that other postponement initiative.
To say that these manifestations missed the point of the hearing is to belabor the obvious.
Fortunately, the three who did speak up against postponement did address the issue head-on. One, most memorably, declared that the situation was not so dire as to outweigh the need to replace lackluster incumbents. This was potentially a powerful argument that, properly supported and substantiated, could have influenced the outcome. But, then again, it was neither properly supported nor even remotely substantiated in the Comelec’s hearing. In fact, that statement was not too well received by the nearly 600 other people in attendance, most of whom were barangay incumbents themselves. Which begs the question: where were the ones who could have stood in opposition?
Considering that a propostponement stance would predictably have many champions, it is probably fair to say that, at some unconscious level, this hearing was not meant to be a platform for the chorus but an opportunity for the dissenters to weigh in and possibly modify the outcome. Thus, precisely to make it easier for stakeholders to personally appear and make their case before the Comelec, this hearing was announced a week in advance; the call for the hearing—including when and where it would be held—was published in three newspapers of national circulation and echoed online; and the hearing itself was held in Davao, instead of Manila. And yet, after all of that, only two individuals speaking only on their own behalf, and one city council—represented by one council member—could be bothered to show up.
As a result of the abject failure of “against-postponement” advocates to emerge from the comfortable confines of the Internet in order to engage the “for-postponement” crowd, in the statutorily mandated forum for doing so, it now seems that the postponement of the 2017 barangay and SK elections in Mindanao, by the Comelec, is that much closer to being a certainty.
There is a lesson to be learned here, and I can only hope that voters start paying attention: Sometimes, all it really takes for something to happen is for some people to do nothing.