ONE of the major thrusts of the Commission on Elections is the promotion of inclusivity in elections. This commitment seeks to ensure that our electoral exercises and procedures are more readily accessible to sectors of society who, while not being completely shut out of electoral processes, are nevertheless faced with challenges that make it more difficult for them, than it is for others, to participate in elections.
There are several of these sectors, which are deemed vulnerable—senior citizens, for instance, for whom the rigors of election day can sometimes be insurmountably daunting; or indigenous persons, who are perennially ill-used by local power structures who view them as mere warm bodies in their political struggles. Women and the youth are likewise considered vulnerable sectors, as they face challenges unique to their place in the old-boys-club environment of Philippine politics.
But by far the most vulnerable sector is that of the persons with disabilities (PWDs). The disadvantages—the barriers to access—faced by PWDs are so numerous that they almost seem baked into the system; so integral into how things are done that many PWDs have simply given up trying to fight them.
Whenever PWDs are mentioned in the context of elections, people normally default to thinking of wheelchair-bound people unable to negotiate steps, or of visually impaired individuals unable to read the lists of candidates. These are all problems, certainly; problems which the Commission on Elections seeks to address with special procedures like Accessible Polling Places and a system of assistors, and so on. What many people fail to realize is that election day access isn’t the only place or time these barriers exist. And this is especially true for PWDs with invisible disabilities, like deafness.
Even before election day, hearing-impaired individuals are essentially denied the ability to meaningfully participate in the democratic process because they can’t hear what candidates are saying on television or radio—both in interviews and political advertisements. This inability is not commented on a lot, even among people who campaign for greater PWD accessibility, so you can only imagine how little is being done to address the problem.
Look at Republic Act 10905—also known as the Closed Caption Law. It was passed by Congress in 2015, but it wasn’t even signed by the President, which led to it lapsing into law almost a full year later. As if that weren’t dismal enough, the law itself provides for significant exemptions from the requirement to provide closed captioning for all television programs: Public-service announcements that are less than 10 minutes long; content that airs between 1 and 6 a.m.; programs that are primarily textual; and cases where compliance would be economically burdensome, with “economically burdensome” being broadly—and almost tautologically—defined as (closed captioning) resulting in “significant difficulty or expense,” mostly to the program producer.
Without going too deeply into the wisdom of that massive back door, you have to ask how long an average political advertisement is, and therefore how completely illusory that reality renders the benefits of this law, particularly in the context of elections? As for that “significant difficulty or expense” clause, an infographic released by a senator explicitly describes the exemption as referring to those instances when closed captioning would be “economically burdensome to TV operators.” Which leaves the hearing impaired out in the cold, doesn’t it?
Thankfully, earlier this week, the Senate Committee on Suffrage agreed to consider new legislation that would require political advertisements to feature sign language interpreters. The details will have to be worked out in a technical working group, of course, and it goes without saying that the specifics of the requirement will have to be well-defined so as not to be too difficult to comply with, but the mere fact that this measure is up for discussion at all is definitely a step in the right direction, moving toward even greater inclusivity in elections.