With the 2018 barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections over, the candidates have one last thing to do: submit their Statements of Contributions and Expenditures (SOCE) on or before June 13.
If you didn’t already know, the SOCE is the primary means by which the Commission on Elections (Comelec) enforces the campaign spending limit imposed by law; in this case, P5 per voter in the barangay where the candidate ran for office. Unfortunately, it is a deeply flawed tool.
Let me explain.
Even the most basic understanding of human psychology will tell you that in order for a prohibition to be effective, two conditions must be present: first, the potential offender’s belief that violating the prohibition will certainly be discovered; and second, that upon discovery, dire consequences are sure to follow.
In the case of the SOCE, neither of these two conditions are actually present. First of all, it is an open secret that the Comelec is woefully undermanned and is unlikely to be able to check every single SOCE submitted by the millions of candidates who run in any of our elections. And considering the vast range of expenses required to be catalogued in a SOCE, keep in mind that each SOCE is actually a voluminous document, often requiring that it be carried around in boxes or small suitcases. Back-checking every item in just one SOCE can most likely take weeks to complete. Imagine having to repeat that process for more than a million other SOCEs.
And, secondly the fact is that noncompliance can, in the immediate term, only delay a winner’s assumption of office—it isn’t actually disqualifying, no matter what some partisans would have people believe —recidivism is required before the law allows the Comelec to levy any meaningful punishment, such as a permanent disqualification from holding public office. Otherwise stated, even if the offender were discovered to have fudged his SOCE, the consequences of the violation are virtually nonexistent. Given these conditions, it is a safe bet that many candidates would take the slap on the wrist rather than go through the trouble of complying, and that of those who actually do comply, only a handful would actually be 100-percent accurate.
As if all of that weren’t bad enough, the SOCE—as a tool for enforcing the campaign spending limit—suffers from one very glaring handicap: Its coverage simply does not start early enough.
Under the applicable law—or more specifically, under the law interpreted in the light of the doctrinal pronouncement of the Supreme Court in Penera v. Comelec—the transactions that must be reported in the SOCE are those that transpired only during the campaign period.
Not to put too fine a point on it, this means that if a candidate were to spend two, three, 10, 100 times more than what he is legally allowed to, he will be able to get away with it for as long as those expenses were incurred prior to the start of the campaign period. To put it another way, the SOCE only covers transactions entered into during the 90 or so days immediately prior to Election Day. Not a single peso—for any tarp or television commercial—spent before that time will ever be counted against the candidate’s spending limit.
If you think that this makes the “spending limit” effectively fictional, you would be right. At this point, the Comelec brandishing the SOCE requirement probably presents as great a threat to moneyed candidates as a kitten to a carabao.
Clearly, the SOCE—regardless of how valiantly the Comelec tries to buttress it—cannot be even remotely effective enough to fulfil the function for which it was intended. But this is a systemic issue with many contributing elements that cannot be solved simply by focusing on one part of the problem or the other. The ridiculously low spending limits, for instance, is one such part of the puzzle that looks like it may be addressed soon. But then, even increasing the amount of money a candidate can spend still won’t guarantee no overspending, much less accurate reporting.
To my mind, the only rational way of looking at this is to reexamine every single element that goes into the whole idea of regulating campaign spending—everything from where the controls have been located in the entire system to how those controls are activated and enforced.
In fact, if we were to think out of the box, we might even ask, should there be spending limits at all?