IN my last piece, I said we need an honest to goodness moral, spiritual and political revolution instead of one more rotten presidential election. If we have to have an election, it should not be as big a farce or a swindle as the ones we had in 2010 and 2013. As an absolute minimum, we should replace the Smartmatic Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) voting machine with something infinitely more trustworthy and transparent. We have a choice between PATaS and TAPAT, two indigenous alternative systems developed by Filipino engineers. And we should prevent a constitutionally disqualified individual from being imposed upon us as a presidential candidate by transnational actors who seem to believe they could get away with anything, just because they own the puppet regime and have all the power, money and dirty tricks at their command.

In their naivete or plain good faith, our voters are routinely attracted to so-called “popular” candidates. These are usually personalities with celebrity status who have all the “falsies,” though not the substance, and who have consistently invested in the popularity surveys. Even in the United States, which seems a bit more advanced, the voters this season seem to respond more to the reputed popularity of some presidential hopefuls than to their known or suspected merits.

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