Earlier this week, the House caucused and came up with a declaration of how it intended to deal with the question of the postponement of the 2017 Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections. According to the reports I read, the main idea was to have the elections postponed to May 2018, and—unless I missed something important—that there would be no appointment of barangay executives.
On the one hand, this was a great development. The news coming out of the House has contributed much to the clarity of the situation. On the other—and, perhaps, more significant—hand, this isn’t quite a postponement, yet. To put it very simply, we are still just a third of the way there.
Postponing the elections requires a law; passing a law is a three-step process. Steps one and two involve the House of Representatives and the Senate coming up with their own versions of the same proposed measure and then harmonizing the two. Step three—the one that seals the deal, so to speak—is the President signing the harmonized bill. As of the moment, we’re all but done with step one, which means we now have to wait for step two.
In the meantime, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) has gone ahead with the printing of the ballots, starting on Wednesday with the 11,000 ballots bound for Batanes. With about 100,000 ballots projected to have been printed by today, Friday, at a cost of three pesos per ballot, that’ll come out to at least P300,000 already committed to the idea that we adhere to the existing schedule of barangay and SK elections. Unless something happens that stops the Comelec from pushing through with its preparations—something like a law that says Stop!—that’s not going to be the last peso we invest in this.
Incidentally, the Comelec is seriously considering suspending the holding of the elections in Mindanao, owing to the fact that the violence and terrorism currently afflicting that area, as evidenced by the declaration of martial law, really makes the holding of free and fair elections there rather iffy. In other words, even if no law is passed postponing the elections nationwide, the Comelec is still predisposed to invoking its authority under the Omnibus Election Code, to suspend elections.
In anticipation of this probability, the Comelec has deviated from its typical ballot-printing schedule. In less parlous times, ballots for Mindanao are often the very first ones to be printed. This ensures that those ballots are packed and shipped first, considering that many precincts in that part of the country are considered “far-flung”.
But since the suspension of the elections in Mindanao is a definite possibility, the printing of ballots for Mindanao has been bumped down in the order of priority. This way, if the elections are, in fact, suspended—a decision that will be made after the August 15 public hearing the Comelec has called for that purpose—then no money will have been spent printing ballots that won’t be used right away anyway.
Makes sense, yes? Here’s to hoping that that sort of logic scales up, sooner rather than later.