Alice in wonderland

By James Jimenez

Imagine being a resident of Wonderland, seeing Alice for the first time. Who is she? Where did she come from? What is she doing here? The past few days have felt like that. By Wonderland, of course, I mean I wonder how someone like her could have land-ed the job of chief executive of a small town, and if the Commission on Elections could have done anything about it.

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

A person wanting to run for public office in the Philippines needs to officially declare their citizenship twice, starting from way before they can even launch a candidacy.

To be a candidate, a person must first be a registered voter; and to become a registered a voter, a person must be a Filipino citizen, at least 18 years old on the day of elections, and a resident of the Philippines for at least one year – and of the place where she intends to run for office, six months – immediately prior to the elections. All these qualifications are declared in the person’s voter registration application form, i.e., the person notes all these details down and at the end of the form, signs a sworn declaration that everything they’ve written is true and accurate.

Looking at things from another angle – this is also the first opportunity anyone has, to question someone’s citizenship. If they did, then the COMELEC’s Election Registration Board, or ERB, would have convened a hearing to hash out the truth of the allegations and decide whether or not to approve the application for registration. In this particular case, Alice appears to have hurdled this first step successfully: no one challenged her eligibility and so her application for registration was approved, effectively establishing her – for all COMELEC intents and purposes – as a Filipino.

“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Once registered, a person is free to file a Certificate of Candidacy, which also contains the second declaration of citizenship a person must make if she is to run for office. And just like in the application for voter registration, this declaration is also under oath.

Because all of these declarations are made under oath, they can be relied on by the COMELEC. To over-simplify: the person’s sworn declaration of their personal circumstances is essentially covered by the Constitutional presumption of innocence – without proof that they lied, they must be presumed to be telling the truth. It is for this very reason that, unless someone challenges the eligibility of a person to become a registered voter, these declarations have to be taken at face value, without need for any attempt to verify their truthfulness or accuracy.

This also explains why the COMELEC duty to accept the Certificates of Candidacy (COC) is merely ministerial – COMELEC is required to act according to the procedures set by law, without using its own judgment or discretion. If someone submits a COC, COMELEC has no choice but to accept it.

“Sentence first – verdict afterwards!”

This quote is from the trial scene in Lewis Carroll’s book, where the Queen of Hearts demands that a sentence be pronounced before the verdict has even been given. For many people, the idea that COMELEC need not verify the claims submitted to it is similarly illogical, seemingly arbitrary, and laughably backwards, and not all conducive to achieving fair and reasonable outcomes.

They are not wrong. In the ideal world, no one should be able to get away with lying to the COMELEC – especially not on such basic matters as one’s citizenship. In Wonderland, however, we must contend with complicating realities.

Every three years, more than thirty thousand people on average, submit COCs for various positions. If COMELEC had to verify each and every claim made on those COCs, it would be able to do nothing else, until long after election day has come and gone.

So instead, the COMELEC relies on other parts of the election eco-system: on the politicians – to do safeguard electoral victory by ensuring that their opponents are truly qualified, and if not to seek their disqualification; and voters themselves, to exercise vigilance to keep the elections honest by getting rid of ineligible candidates. As for the promises on paper – the registration application form and the COC – their true value is in their being the means to punish those who would defraud the process, via an action for perjury.

“You are nothing but a pack of cards.”

The COMELEC requires two declarations of citizenship from people who intend to run for office, and because of this, it can feel like a betrayal of duty whenever COMELEC says they can’t do anything because no one filed a case against Alice. But COMELEC is not wrong, and anyone calling out for COMELEC accountability in this case is just barking up the wrong tree.

What we should take away from this is that the task of ensuring the integrity of elections is simply too massive to be left entirely to one government agency. Citizens must also be on the look-out. Voters must remain vigilant against the tricks and deceptions that threaten to distort the truth and integrity of elections.

COMELEC’s rules and procedures may have made it possible for Alice to slip into Wonderland, but it was the voters who voted to make her a Queen.