Blog Posts by Ramon Casiple

Benigno Aquino won, and won big. No, not the Fourth, the one I am referring to is the Third. Though he was not a candidate, President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III got the most gains from the 2013 national and local elections. These gains will impact on his last three years in office and probably in the 2016 presidential elections.

Of course, his Team PNoy senatorial slate got nine out of 12 seats open for grab. This immediately got his administration’s Liberal Party (LP) and Senate allies—Nacionalista Party (NP), the Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC), and a motley pack of independents—the super-majority of 16 or 17 in the upper House.

In the lower House of Representatives, LP alone won more than 110 seats. Together with allies, it hopes to dominate the lower House with more than 240 seats out of the 290 total available seats. This is again a super-majority.

In the local race, the results are not spectacular but the Aquino administration and its allies also made significant gains.

The Senate in its last two session days before finally adjourning the 15^th Congress, saw a dramatic—yet expected—exit of Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and his close ally Senate Majority Leader Vicente “Tito” Sotto III. They resigned, with each taking a session day. The fall-out from the victory of the Aquino administration in the 2013 national and local elections has begun.

The Team PNoy senatorial slate won nine of the 12 seats being contested in the elections. Given the obvious quid pro quo, all of these nine senators-to-be are expected to align with the Liberal Party in the next 16^th Congress. With the expected support of the Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC) and the Nationalista Party (NP), the Aquino administration and the Liberal Party are poised to get either 16 or 17 majority votes in the race for the senate presidency. This is a “super majority” or at least two-thirds majority.

Enrile and Sotto had to bow to the inevitable. It feebly attempted earlier, through Senator

The new term we need to remember in connection with the 2013 elections is “weak law of large numbers.” Sometimes called “Bernoulli’s theorem” (not the one about the fluids equation), this term came up in relation to the brouhaha about a supposed “60-30-10” ratio that a smart Ateneo mathematician noticed in the senatorial results of the tally.

Brittanica Encyclopedia defined “law of large numbers” in statistics as “the theorem that, as the number of identically distributed, randomly generated variables increases, their sample mean (average) approaches their theoretical mean.” Applied to election statistics, this simply means that when the count reaches the large numbers (in the 2013 elections, in the millions or tens of millions) it generally stabilizes around a central point (in this case, the percentages).

In the 2013 elections, roughly 60 percent of the votes went to Team PNoy senatorial candidates, around 30 percent went to United Nationalist Alliance candidates, and around 10

The 12 new senators have been proclaimed. According to rank, the number one senator in this batch is Grace Poe-Llamanzares, the daughter of the late actor Fernando Poe, Jr. (FPJ), the 2004 opposition presidential candidate. FPJ was seen by many Filipinos as the victim of electoral cheating by former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) in a closely-fought contest. In 2005, the so-called “Garcillano tapes” surfaced, cementing the suspicion of cheating and embarking the GMA administration on its hugely unpopular administration until 2010.

The surprising lead position of Grace Poe-Llamanzares was at the expense of twice-number one senator, Loren Legarda, whom the former beat, 20.15 million to 18.48 million with only 350,000 votes still to be counted. Poe-Llamanzares’ huge win created ripples throughout the ranks of would-be presidentiables in the coming 2016 presidential elections. It has already been likened to President Aquino’s own dramatic entry into the presidential race in

The unofficial count is still going on and the official count is still at the local level. We can say, however, that the May 13, 2013 national and local elections were relatively peaceful, free and fair by Philippine standards. However, the real news here was the triumph of traditional politics, including the politics of guns, goons and gold. Ironically, it also saw the retreat of reform-oriented politics, as one of the major advocates—the ruling Liberal Party—set it aside in favor of traditional ways of politics.

The current 9-3 Team PNoy lead in the senatorial race bodes the capture of Senate leadership and of the entire 16th Congress by the Aquino administration.  It also got the majority of local positions. This can good or bad, depending on how the administration wields the power.

If it pursues its anti-corruption and anti-poverty campaigns, then it is in a position to make wide-ranging and long-term reforms in these areas. More so if it pursues institutional political and economic

May 13 is your day. The voter, that is. No warlord, no special operator, no cheater, no vote-buyer, and no unscrupulous election officer or board of inspector can or should distract the voter from voting in secret his free choice of leaders. Voting freely is a hallmark of our democracy.

There may not enough genuine leaders to vote for but wherever they may be, the voters would be able to discern them and vote for them. However, by and large, in so many places, the vote is characterized as voting between a devil you know and the bigger devil you may not know, or between the greater or lesser evil.

Traditional politics has trapped the voters between seemingly unpalatable choices—within the narrow circle of the elite political clans or families organized into political dynasties.  This circle includes those they co-opt or compromise from the popular leaders that appear from time to time.

In a democracy such as ours, the formalities are democratic but the substance is not. Anybody,

Overshadowed by the bigger battle for senatorial slots, the battle for slots in the party-list system seems unexciting and dull. The candidates are party-list groups, and they are actually not competing against each other but against themselves.

In the first round, they strive to reach the two percent threshold for getting a guaranteed seat. Achieving this means getting at least two percent of the total votes cast for the party-list system.

In the second round, they strive to achieve the highest percentage short of the two percent threshold, hoping to qualify for the remaining available seats. A Supreme Court decision  had decreed that all the seats assigned to the party-list system should be filled up by the party-list groups ranked according to their percentage share of the total party-list votes (less two or four percent, as the case maybe, for those who have shares above the threshold.)

However, the interesting thing about the behavior of party-list groups during the accreditation

Personal attacks, though present from the start of the national campaign, have intensified the last few days, both in the senatorial and local campaigns. At the senatorial level, we have witnessed the disparagement of candidate Nancy Binay as having the sole credentials as “vice-presidential daughter” and nothing else. Senator Loren Legarda was accused by a certain Biraogo, a “media publicist,” of stashing hidden wealth in New York’s fashionable Park Avenue in the form of a million-dollar apartment. Juan “Jackie” Ponce Enrile, Jr. has his alleged murderous misdeeds of Marcos dictatorial years, including the death of then-popular movie star Alfie Anido, brought back into the limelight. Senator Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan, Jr. likewise experienced a public flashback of his alleged 1986 key role in the abduction and gruesome murder of Atty. Rolando Olalia and his driver, Leonor Alay-ay when the case against former Col. Kapunan had a hearing.

Earlier in March, Senator Aquilino “Koko”