Do it like Singapore

ELECTIONS in Singapore run so smoothly, they are hardly noticeable outside the city-state. We suspect most people here in the Philippines are probably unaware that Singapore just conducted a national election, returning the People’s Action Party (PAP) and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to power for at least the next four years in a process that took, from the time office-seekers filed their candidacies until the last vote was counted, a total of about two weeks.

To be sure, Singapore’s size and its disciplined political and social environment make an efficient election possible, and it is not reasonable to expect that applying the Singapore election model here in a copy-and-paste fashion would have the same productive results. And there are certain aspects of the way elections in Singapore are organized that would definitely find a poor reception among our enthusiastically democratic if embarrassingly undisciplined electorate. Critics of the ruling PAP – which has dominated the government since 1965 – have, for example, argued that Singapore’s odd way of grouping parliamentary seats under an otherwise winner-take-all, or first-past-the-post system gives the PAP an unfair advantage.