If the country’s elite and traditional politicians had their way, the Party-list system is an easier route to take to increase their dominance in the House of Representatives. In the present 15th Congress, 51 of the Party-list congressmen are millionaires or multi-millionaires while more than 10 percent come from political clans. Since the first 1998 elections for Party-list, this “social justice tool” which was envisioned to ensure the representation in Congress of marginalized sectors has been increasingly taken over by the elite. The elite’s bogus party-list groups claim to represent labor, farmers, indigenous peoples, vendors or drivers when in fact they come from big business, are operators of exclusive universities, landlords, emerging religious empires, and other business enterprises. Many of them are backed by incumbent administrations, have blood relatives among the powers that be in government, or were themselves former members of Congress or local officials.
Conflicting interpretations of the Party-list accreditation process between the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the Supreme Court (SC) have also allowed the entry of unqualified groups into the system. Allegations of corruption in the election accreditation have also been exposed. For the 2013 mid-term elections, the Comelec has accredited 79 Party-list groups. Including the 33 that were given reprieve (or status quo ante / SQA) by the Supreme Court but which were earlier disqualified for being fake Party-lists, the total number of those running in the 2013 elections is 112. Contrary to the poll body’s claims of purging those unqualified, the list actually includes 23 that should have been disqualified with eight of them still in the 15th Congress. Including the 33 groups who were granted reprieve by the high court, the number of non-marginalized groups in running is 56 or 50 percent of the total. Among the 33 groups the SC wanted to run in the 2013 elections are Bantay of human rights fugitive, former Army Gen. Jovito Palparan, the military-backed anti-communist vigilante Anad, and Kakusa of the Jalosjos dynasty in Mindanao.
These elite, non-marginalized groups enjoy the advantage of dynastic connections, money, and government-military support thus threatening the legitimate representation of the genuine Party-list groups. Claiming to be a Party-list group, Akbayan was allowed to run again when its leaders, as leftist groups charged, now enjoy Cabinet-level positions and access to government coffers. With a decreasing mass constituency, Akbayan ran in 2010 with the support of a presidential sister-turned-TV host who, along with some businessmen, reportedly shelled out more than P100 million of campaign kitty, according to Comelec official reports on campaign financing.
Aside from the logistical advantage of elite Party-list groups, genuine PL formations face the hurdle of how to win at least one seat through the 2 percent voting threshold. And that’s because of the built-in inaccuracy of Smartmatic’s precinct count optical scan (PCOS) voting machines. When tested in a Congress mock election last July 24-25, the voting machines registered a 2.6 percent discrepancy or 97.7 percent accuracy rating as against the required 99.995 percent and a high rejection rate of ballots at 4 percent. The 2.6 percent discrepancy is more than the 2 percent threshold required to win one Party-list seat and will trigger anarchy from the sheer impossibility of determining the winners.