Elections as culture

PINOY KASI

Elections as culture
By Michael Tan

Inquirer
Last updated 01:26am (Mla time) 05/16/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- Philippine elections have been compared -- and rightly so -- to our fiestas, with their rough and tumble revelry. Or to a carnival, with side shows and cheap thrills and being taken for a ride.

I think the elections are more than festive events. They are now an integral part of Filipino culture. Let me do a bit of personal ethnography here to explain what I mean.

I arrived at the polling place around 7:30 in the morning and was pleasantly surprised to find large crowds. Who says Filipinos are always late? We do have an early-bird syndrome that comes out when we face situations of scarcity, especially when we’re talking about desirable goods. We see this early-bird syndrome at, for example, job fairs where there is only a handful of job openings, or at parties where food is served buffet-style, with the guests rushing up as soon as food is available and piling their plates sky-high with food, fearful that there wouldn’t be any left if they wanted seconds.

Elections trigger the early-bird syndrome in a different way. People anticipate problems of missing names, missing lists or even missing precincts. It’s the same way we handle any government-related activity, for example, getting a birth certificate at the National Statistics Office. We go early to beat the crowds, and if something goes wrong, there’s more time to unravel the problem and, hopefully, take care of everything in one day.

Gender, rituals

The early-bird syndrome probably also reflects how seriously we take elections. There’s excitement about this political exercise which generates the fiesta-cum-carnival atmosphere. You can see that excitement in the composition of the voters: women and men of all ages, and quite a few elderly with their walking canes -- even an occasional caregiver to help them along.

The ones managing the precincts were predominantly women. That probably reflects the gender distribution of our public school teachers, but I couldn’t help but wonder, too, about gender roles, the women handling the most crucial tasks such as giving out and receiving the ballots. The men were assigned to -- you guessed it -- fingerprinting the voters and applying the indelible ink after someone had voted. Messy work, but simple enough for the male brain. Now, tell me if that isn’t the way we often assign tasks in daily life.

The precincts reminded me of another aspect of local culture: our tendency to have too many people handling a fairly simple task. There were just too many people, including watchers. At the same time, I could understand that our elections have become a matter of watching the watchers. I didn’t feel any tension in the place I voted, but I can imagine that in other parts of the country, the watchers had reason to be vigilant, given the potentials of fraud and violence.

The problem here is that the bulk of the work is still handled by one or two people, so everything moves at a snail’s pace, sometimes made slower because there are too many people milling around and getting in each other’s way. The lone male in my precinct looked bored, but had the initiative to go through our queue to check if the voters knew their identification numbers.

Many didn’t have voter ID cards, which takes me to the haphazard way we do things. Although voters’ registration took place a long time ago, the printing of the ID cards seemed almost arbitrary. My parents got their cards, but I didn’t, although we registered together. I dropped by the local office of the Commission on Elections a few days before the election and a member of the staff found my record on the computer monitor. You’re there, he assured me, but they couldn’t print out the ID cards because they didn’t have the budget. I was told any ID card would do.

In the end, no one ever asked me for an ID card because they were too busy with all kinds of little rituals. We’re very good at making simple things complicated. Each ballot, for example, had a number, which had to be copied on their form, which has always made me wonder about confidentiality. Sign here. Fingerprint here. Fingerprinting, incidentally, is a procedure that was originally intended for illiterates. It serves no purpose today except to make us feel we’re doing something official.

After voting, the ballot stub has to be removed. Because some printing contractor made money again on bad perforations, the precinct people had to use scissors to cut the stubs. Time wasted again.

The ballot box had two compartments, one for the stub, one for the ballot itself. I saw one voter putting the stub in the wrong compartment. One of the schoolteachers shrugged and moved quickly, whipping out a key to unlock the compartment, pull out the stray ballot and then lock the box again. Rules, rules, rules -- all made to be broken.

Filipino-style, we complain all the time about elections but deep down, we’re really quite proud of our democratic system, the elections included. We’re becoming more critical with our voting, more vigilant with safeguarding the vote. We’re moving forward, despite the warlord-politicians in many parts of the country and in spite of the current Commission on Elections.

Elections are the one time we go beyond rhetoric and demonstrate our appreciation of democracy. I’m always touched by the TV coverage of ballots being brought in from remote areas. Someone should do a documentary on how ballots are transported from the island municipalities of Sulu and Tawi-tawi, or the mountain communities of the Cordillera. We would also like to hear more about what the schoolteachers go through, including the story of Filomena Tatlonghari, the schoolteacher in Mabini, Batangas, who was shot to death after she refused to surrender the ballot box to armed men during the elections in 1995.

Elections speak of Philippine culture, and of the Filipino.

Agham

I’m still on elections but moving away from my ethnography. One of my anthropology graduate students, Erika Rey, wrote about the confusion around Agham. In a column last Friday, I had mentioned Agham as a party-list organization of people from the science and technology sector and gave www.agham.org as the organization’s website.

It turns out that website belongs to another Agham, to which Erika belongs. The organization was established in 1997, with a long full name: Samahan ng Nagtataguyod ng Agham at Teknolohiya para sa Sambayanan. Its chair is Dr. Giovanni Tapang, a physicist teaching at the University of the Philippines.

Erika sent a press statement dated May 10 describing their group as a “national organization of scientists, engineers and advocates dedicated to make science and technology serve the people through direct community service and advocacy.” The organization has taken an advocacy role around issues like power rate increases, oil price hikes, the Philippine-US military exercises Balikatan, the proposed tax on text messaging. They have also participated in congressional hearings on issues like mining, genetic engineering and the budget for science. This Agham emphasizes they are not running as a party-list organization and instead endorses Bayan Muna.