aldric de ocampo,
Opinion: On the Elections (Part 1): Uncontested Elections
The voting season was recently completed , as the national senatorial elections were held on the 13th, and the University of the Philippines Integrated School (UPIS) elections on the eighth. This is a good example of the expression of democracy here in our community, as people can freely express political opinions for their representatives in leadership positions. Or can they?
UPIS in particular has a relatively functional environment for the election of student-leaders as officials in the school as opposed to the national scale. Despite implementing a compulsory voting system for the student body, somehow, students can avoid this by not wearing their IDs. This is because UPIS follows its Comission on Elections (COMELEC) rules which require that voters need their IDs to be able to vote. Also, the school has shown that students have still been quite fair in passing their votes to the respective authorities and that there has yet been any case of violence due to conflicts from the elections. Another thing to note is that there have been no cases of cheating in the elections in the previous years.
However, UPIS faces an issue rarely encountered by the national elections which gets ignored by most students. This is the issue of uncontested elections.
Uncontested elections occur when there is only a single candidate running for a seat in an organization, meaning there is no one opposing said candidate in the election. Usually, a formal election is not needed for these kinds of cases since the candidate is automatically appointed to the position they ran for. This is called “election by acclamation”. Although if the bylaws, or the rules made by an organization, dictate that ballot votes are required for an election, then the organization must follow that.
UPIS as an organization follows that ballot votes are still cast for the elections despite having only one candidate running for a position. This means voters are given the options of voting for the candidate or abstaining from the vote in the ballot.
This system though undermines the democratic power of the student body. For one, the students and their interests are not well represented in uncontested elections. Yes, being given the choice of abstaining the candidate in the ballot does express the political opinion of students, but the adjustments made afterwards do not.
According to the UPIS COMELEC rules, “vacant positions may be filled in by appointment or special elections.” Through appointments, a party without opposition needs most of its candidates seated in order to implement the option of having their partymate/s appointed to the vacant position/s, only if said partymate has garnered the majority (50% + 1) of votes cast in the elections. Another appointment situation is that a vacant position may be filled in by the UPIS Executive Committee in consultation with the COMELEC, pamunuan ng Kamag-Aral (pKA), and Year-Level Organizations (YLO) of the Academic Year after the elections.
For special elections, the COMELEC may recommend holding another election with reservation to special situations, such as filling an important vacant position like the President of the pKA. However, special elections are rarely held for the students, and appointments are usually used as the alternative. This, in turn, defeats the purpose of even holding the first election, and does not properly and proportionately represent the public opinion of the students.
In order to avert this situation, an extra option may be added in the ballots where a choice for suggesting a student in the uncontested position is allowed. This gives the students an alternative which better reflects their preferences more, instead of having a student appointment not within their direct influence.
The electoral system of the school, where the student body’s nominees are recognized and votes for them are counted, must be well formulated to have this suggestion properly incorporated though, as students may give varying names as nominees for the position. From this, it is then recommended that research on this kind of system be undertaken to see if adopting it is feasible.
Another easier suggestion is to have the appointee for the position undergo a ballot election to be fair in expressing the students’ opinions on the matter. This solution though is prone to triggering a cycle of multiple appointees if the general public remains dissatisfied with the choices. It is therefore not that feasible compared to the first suggestion.
A third solution may also be holding an assembly for the vacant position. Constituents may offer nominees this way rather than writing them through ballots. However, if the vacant position is present to organizations such as the pKA, which embodies the whole school, it may become difficult to contain the number of students in the assembly and to filter out nominees like that of the first suggestion. For this, a possible solution is to stratify the school into groups such as ones based on year levels and have a group nominee instead individual ones to limit the number of suggestions. Nonetheless, this also needs research to see the effectivity of such a system.
Also, giving incentives , such as giving bonuses in grades or the like, for candidacy and taking up leadership positions could help in increasing student participation in organizations. Instead of perceiving leadership positions as extra workload, students must be able to see the value of taking initiative and serving the constituents of their organizations. With this, students will be more convinced to run for official positions and help improve the state of the school.
This, however, may also cause a division between leaders and followers, since giving an incentive to officers may seem to be unfair for the rest of the students. The thing is though, the officers do have a responsibility they must fulfill unlike other students, which should make the incentives they receive proportional to their additional work.
Incentives can only go so far though because improving the attitude of the students on initiative is the bottomline and most vital piece in establishing a truly democratic system. Without the students’ will in attempting to achieve the full potential of their power as a collective by expressing their political opinions freely, the foundations of a democratic system are violated and contradicted. And if this dysfunction in the democracy of UPIS remains unaddressed, especially by us students, then our freedom as a student body is endangered as well.
An older article from the Media Center blogspot also provides more insight on the issue of uncontested elections and its implications on the expression of democracy in UPIS: http://upismc.blogspot.com/2018/04/opinion-all-single-parties-put-cap-on-it.html
It is also worth knowing that even without the case of uncontested elections, our electoral system may still be improved to represent the political preferences of the people.
Stay tuned for the second part of this article which will discuss different voting systems that may help improve the democratic system of UPIS. //by Aldric de Ocampo
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