Election Aftermath

As usual majority of the candidates in the last May 10, 2010 election did not try to be earth friendly when campaigning. And same as past election, the Philippines is littered with election paraphernalia after the election. The big burdened lies again to our poor street cleaners.

But there is one change that is very positive. The Philippines held their first automated election. During the manual counting of votes, the counting usually takes months before the winner will be proclaimed but due to the automation the counting of votes only took weeks. This not only help speed up the election and lessened the burdened of election personnel, it also help reduce the carbon emission. The automated election make the counting in the Precinct level finish in just one day, this save a lot of electricity being used during the counting of the vote. And since the results of the counting is being transmitted electronically to municipal and provincial board of canvasser, no need to use a lot of gasoline powered vehicle to ferry the ballot boxes and election returns. This save a lot in transportation cost for election personnel, watchers and candidates.

I hope this is the start of the improvement of Philippines ' election. There are still some minor glitches but this maybe because it is the first time we automate the election. I hope that we will learn from our mistake and those glitches that give us a little delay in voting will no longer be there on the next election. I also heard that the Commission of Election will penalize those candidates that put their campaign poster in the non-designated poster area. Though their intention is not to avoid pollution due to non-biodegradable materials being used as election paraphernalia, this will at least discourage future candidates to use that kind of materials. I also noticed that there are already some Filipinos who volunteered in the cleaning, what amazing is that all the campaign materials they were able to collect will be recycled and their intention for helping is to clean the environment.

Philippines Election 2010

On May 10, 2010, we will select again our new leaders. There was no survey conducted that will show what is the majority of the Filipinos want to their new leader. But if you will base it on the survey that determines who is leading in the presidential race, it looks like that the Filipino prefers honest leader while expertise in business in close second. This is because the leading candidate for president is a son of pro-democracy icons. A win for leading candidate Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino would return power to a dynasty that has near saint-like status in the Philippines. His father, Ninoy Aquino, was a democracy activist and vocal opponent of martial law. He was gunned down and killed at Manila Airport in 1983. His mother, Corazon Aquino, subsequently led the famous "People Power" movement that ended martial law and ushered in democracy. She was later elected president from 1986 to 1992. Noynoy has done a very, very effective job as presenting himself as the least corrupt candidate. While Noynoy's main rival, Manuel Villar, is a self-made billionaire with a rags-to-riches story, who has tried to run a populist campaign promising that he will use his business expertise in removing the Filipinos from poverty.

If the Filipinos choose them because of their campaign promises, that means this survey also shows that environment is not yet the main concern of the majority of the Filipino right now. This is because Nicanor Perlas the presidential candidate known to be as environmentalist lags behind in the presidential survey. This is not hard to accept for the Filipinos to have this choice because Philippines ranked No. 139 in Transparency International's 180-country Corruption Perception Index last year, far worse than China (79), India (84) or even Indonesia (111). And the country's per-person GDP, at $3,300 on a purchasing-power basis, lags behind many Asian peers, and about one-third of the Philippines' 100 million populations live in poverty.

What is not acceptable is majority of the candidates does not include the environment on their campaign promises and sadly their way of campaigning is harmful to environment. I already discussed the campaigning strategy of Filipinos in my previous blog; entitled "Environment Friendly Campaigning" this will show how I consider it as not environment friendly way of campaigning. And unfortunately it is still happening in this election.