By CARLOS D. MARQUEZ JR.
Nueva Ecija Gold
CABANATUAN CITY.—Mang Cesar sat on the curb for hours on election eve expecting the politician’s ward who earlier in the day had gotten their names after asking who they will vote for mayor would return and give him money. He was looking forward to using the money on a cockfight and beer after the election ban is over. But nobody came, not even after the neighbors had shut their lights and television programs had signed off. He left when the last note of “Lupang Hinirang” faded.
Gapangan (crawling) is an age-old form of vote-buying in most parts of Luzon. It is the last-minute attempt of local candidates to insure win by hushing out reluctant voters in the dead of the night and sealing the virtual contract with some cash enough only to buy the family’s meal for a day or two.
Complaints against this vote-buying technique clogged the telephone lines of the Nueva Ecija police headquarters on the evening of May 9, said provincial police director Supt. Ricardo Marquez. “But there was nobody there when the police officers deployed reached the reported area,” he said.
Earlier, tricycle drivers, senior citizens and market vendors in this city reportedly received P200 each in exchange for the vote for a mayoral candidate.
On Monday, a “concerned citizen” called local AM station dzXO to report a barangay treasurer making Muslim residents line up and sign an “attendance sheet” before they were allowed to vote.
Although apparently still rampant, vote-buying is not a surefire way to win elections, said Antonio Concepcion, a graduate of political science from the University of the Philippines and a longtime public administrator and political adviser of certain local officials in Nueva Ecija. Many voters have become shrewder: They would take the money but still not vote candidate who was the source.
In the 2007 elections, a candidate in a vote-rich town in Nueva Ecija spent up to P50 million, election propaganda included. Candidates in minor areas shelled out about P20 million.
A large chunk of the campaign money went to coordinators, poll watchers, election officers and teachers, campaign workers privy to spending said. By turning them into their coordinators and watchers, the candidates are already assured they had bought these people’s votes and, in the process, constitutes a form of vote-buying itself.
Candidates gave out from P1,000 to P5,000, depending on the recipient’s influence on the votes. But sums could go higher: Some would surprisingly be seen riding a brand-new car shortly after an election.
Vote-buying became more pronounced in Nueva Ecija with the emergence of the so-called money politics, which replaced the patronage politics in the mid-1990s. “In the in Nueva Ecija experience, there are two kinds of vote-buying: P1,000 to vote and P500 to refrain from voting a candidate,” said Concepcion.
“You buy only how many you need (in places) where you are particularly weak,” he said. “You don’t normally buy teachers and rivals’ watchers—unless massive cheating plan is already in place.”
Because candidates are unsure if the voters who take their money would keep their word, the local analyst said a number of them resort to another arrangement: “The seller lends his voter’s ID or just leaves town.”
“Breach of contract,” resulting from voters’ failure to elect a candidate from whom they got the money, is a known cause of election killings in Nueva Ecija.
Some “violators” have ended up dumped by the roadside. But at least one campaign worker was known to have been fed to ferocious dogs at the house of a candidate he had double-crossed.