LEVELING the competition field for the election of government officials goes into the heart of democracy and democratic representation.
National and local government executives and legislators are direct trustees of the people as they are chosen to use the people’s power and resources in advancing the interests of the people and the country.
A level playing field for elections is important because it will ensure that some candidates will not be “favored” by the people simply because they have the advantage of “selling” or promoting themselves more than other candidates because they have more money to spend.
What we need to advance the true essence of democratic representation is to make the candidates “sell” themselves to the people within a uniform set of parameters.
The financial resources of candidates should not determine the candidates’ worthiness of the people’s trust. As such, our election system should really not provide for any form of advantage to candidates with more financial resources than other candidates.
As things currently stand, the actions of the Comelec in seeing to it that candidates do not spend more than what the law allows for their campaign are at best of little value to the objective of imposing limitations on campaign spending.
Candidate may have spent within the campaign spending limit because reference is limited to expenses incurred during the official campaign period but they may have effectively overspent when their expenses before the campaign period are factored in.
The current state of things effectively watered down as well the concept of campaign period because campaign activities before the campaign period are not considered campaign activities.
We are just fooling ourselves. While our election laws provide for a period within which campaign activities can be done, campaigning can actually be done before such period.
What’s also bad in our current system is the manner by which persons seeking elective government posts circumvent the provisions of election laws and Comelec regulations on premature campaigning even before the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of a candidate for election.
Omitting the word “vote” in activities and materials that are obviously intended for election campaign is an example of how some candidates violate the law to be trusted by the people with the power to make and enforce laws.
At the end of the day, the responsibility of strengthening our democracy is not for the government and elected officials only. We can strengthen our democracy by seeing through the campaign actions of candidates and making what we see direct our voting action during elections.
