INCLUDING today, there are eight days left for people to see to their voter registration status. Most will be first-time voters, a category that includes both those who are just turning 18 and those who are already older than that but who, for one reason or another, haven’t registered to vote yet.
Some will be reactivators—people who, as a consequence of failing to vote in two successive national elections, have had their voting status deactivated. There are also those who will be seeking to transfer their voting records, i.e., people who used to vote in one place but now are planning to cast their ballots elsewhere. And then there are those who simply want to amend the details of their voter registration records, those who are just now regaining their political rights. It’s not a homogenous group by any stretch of the imagination.
Just to illustrate: at the special satellite registration event in Cotabato City last week, held in conjunction with the upcoming plebiscite on the Bangsamoro Organic Law, I saw people as young as 16 years old (turned away, of course, for being underaged) to 109 wanting to get registered; most of them, even the older ones, were first-time voters, while a significant number claimed to have voted last when the now Mayor of Manila aspired for the highest office in the land. All told, over three days in Cotabato City, more than 800 people turned up to enlist as voters at the special registration event; throughout the region, more than 11,000—all of them in addition to the thousands more being signed up at the same time all over the rest of the country. With numbers like that, is it any wonder that the
Commission on Elections expects there to be more than 60 million registered voters eligible to vote in the 2019 national and local elections?
To say that this bodes well for our democratic way of life is to belabor the obvious. Unfortunately, it is equally obvious that far too many people are getting impatient with the ways of democracy. And others seem bent on trivializing the role of elections, in favor of quick fixes.
The problem, as I see it, is that impatience with democracy leads people to believe that it would be a good idea to circumvent elections; to substitute mass movements for the will of the people as expressed in elections—the consent of the governed. This is true for “people power” movements which run roughshod over the Constitution, just as it is true for Constitutional impeachments or deliberate and purposeful declarations of revolutionary governments. Regardless of the motivations behind them, all these methods, in effect, attempt to substitute the will of some for the consent of the governed, all in the name of a more perfect government. But that argument misses the point.
Democracy has never promised perfect government, or the best of all possible governments. The guarantee of democracy has always just been that the people would be governed by people chosen by the people. And the only way of determining the choice of the people is through suffrage. This is not what happens in an uprising, however, clad that uprising might be in the trappings of “popular democracy.” Eschewing elections is typically justified as a necessary step to win (or win back) democracy. But true democracy is not a prize to be won at the end of a struggle. It is a continuing state that is always in danger of falling apart—a temporary respite from the sickness that is tribalism, constantly at risk of relapse. And because I am aware of the ease with which democracy can be transformed into something other, I do tend to cling to those beliefs (corny or unpragmatic as some might say they are) that are, at their root, a rejection of all the trappings of nondemocracy.
So, even at this late date—or perhaps precisely because of the lateness of the hour—I renew my call for people to come to the registration centers to ensure that they can be a part of true democracy as sovereign voters from whom the leaders ultimately derive their
authority to lead.