Protecting party-list system

The framers of our Constitution and those who conceived the party-list system in our country had the best intention to guarantee that only those “truly belonging to marginalized and underrepresented sectors, such as labor, peasants, fisherfolk, urban poor, indigenous cultural communities, elderly, handicapped, women, youth, veterans, overseas workers and professionals” represent these sectors.

However, judging from the results of the recent election, these sectors have been practically set aside or are no longer represented. Instead, what we have now are party lists belonging to or organized by political clans and other self-interest groups whose real motive is to become members of Congress “through the backdoor.”

The weakness of our law on party list and the laxity of the Commission on Elections in approving the applications for party-list accreditation have contributed to the continuing prostitution of the system. In a word, the very institutions mandated to implement the system have not shown any sincere effort and concern to protect the rights and interests of the sectors that deserve to benefit from the system.

But all is not lost. To ensure that these sectors are properly installed, all that is needed is to promulgate appropriate rules “grouping by sector” the party-list groups, with each of them identifying the specific sector it belongs to or wants to represent.

For example, a group claiming it represents the “veterans sector” should be “grouped” with that sector; a group claiming to represent the “youth sector” will be grouped with the “youth sector,” and so on. So that if a particular sector has, for instance, five accredited party-list groups, then whichever gets the highest number of votes shall be entitled to a seat in Congress.

In this way, all the sectors that the Constitution envisions to be represented under the party-list system are assured of representation. The sectors themselves can monitor any group claiming to belong to a particular sector as they can object or oppose the registration of such group before the Comelec.

No alphabetical arrangement on the ballot. At present, the names or acronyms of party-list groups are arranged alphabetically on the ballot. Because of this method, some groups have their names or acronyms start with letter “A” or with number “1” to secure a vantage position on the ballot. And this is the reason why almost 60 percent of the party-list groups have names starting with letter “A” or number “1.”

To discourage this scheme, the Comelec should not alphabetically arrange the names of the party-list groups on the ballot. Before printing the ballots, the Comelec should raffle the numbers to be assigned to them on the ballots. Voters need not worry even if we have many party-list groups on the ballots, for anyway we would only be voting for one and its name and number will not be too hard to memorize.

—ROMULO B. MACALINTAL,
election lawyer,
Philamlife Village, Las Piñas City