Sibayan, Erlyne R.

A Review to the Voter Turn-Out Panel

People vote. In democracy its one of your rights and some consider it one of your

obligations. Either way the rule of the masses is marked by this ability to run for office or to

select the people who will be a part of the body where political authority lies. But does the turn

out reveal the reason why it’s that kind of trend or why there are people who vote or those who

don’t.

Most of the time the figures refer to just that, figure of the outcome and they don’t reveal

anything else unless one place an interpretation to them putting them on a standard or index to

measure this very means. This group more of asserted than really give any kind of explanation to

their assertion like on what standards can we say that the numbers on the board mean anything at

all. But this was already pointed out. Instead, I would rather delve on the possibilities that this

group left out.

When it comes to voting, it seems really straightforward whether it’s automated or not

basically, you place a vote in a secret ballot, it gets counted and the results win usually my some

form of majority. One of the papers of this group decided to talk about the reason why people

don’t vote but assessing that kind of psyche is like she concluded way too subjective unless there

was an actual a societal reason for it. I would have been more interested if they had presented

voting patterns instead or different types of election like UK has a general election where they

vote for their MPs or how Singapore has a dominant political party that always wins.

The Philippines and as far as elections go from here vote-buying is a definite trend and

it’s seems more institutionalized than anything else. We also have the Omnibus Code that

actually limits the amount of expenditure of campaigns but isn’t really followed most of the time

and solving this could potentially change politics in our country. Then there’s the party-list

system or our political parties though this does seem a tad overrated already but still just turn out

seems a little drab.

Candidacy also seems like an interesting topic. Like if it is about voting trends, what type

of occupation is usually voted into office or is it really rooted strongly on familial ties like

political dynasties. What about provincial elections where fraud is found and even COMELEC

invalidates the win, can the already seated incumbent be removed from office? How does an

election work in the ARMM region?

At the end of the day, the idea of voting can’t be so easily reduced to figures that seem

meaningless. Also, there are other forms of voting aside from election where people exert their

political authority via a vote like a plebiscite. And the unwavering question i have is, does a high

voter turn-out ascertains democracy the way that some argue political sophistication isn’t really

that necessary for a democracy?