PCOS I love you
Senior citizenship does have its privileges. Aside from getting a 20-percent discount on their restaurant bills (at the risk of death to any foolish store manager who refuses), seniors can also cut in front of others in queues without getting into a fistfight. This explains not only why I often eat out with my mother-in-law but also why I was able to dramatically beat even the COMELEC’s most optimistic time-and-motion projections on how fast it would take to vote last May 10. Amid the short tempers and extremely long lines at our voting center, I did have a few anxious moments when two burly looking barangay tanods quickly approached us after we jumped the line. Fortunately, they only wanted to help me carry my mother-in-law, who was in a wheelchair, down some steps. I did not fully realize how lucky we had been, however, until I found out in the news how some people waited for up to eight hours in the sweltering heat before they got to cast their ballot. It was just crazy!
Indeed, some psychologists and social scientists suggest that, from an individual’s perspective, voting may be a crazy and irrational act. They argue that this is because the potential benefit of voting is far, far less than its actual cost. In the first place, they point out that the impact of one vote is infinitesimally small. For example, there are 50 million registered voters in the Philippines. Given COMELEC’s estimate of a 75-percent turnout, the weight of your vote in selecting our next president was only 0.0000027 percent. They claim that the only instance where your vote could truly matter was if there was a tie and you were the last voter to cast his/her ballot. The probability of this happening, however, could even be more remote. Moreover, the counter argument that if you don’t vote, then everybody else might not also vote and result in the collapse of Philippine democracy is a fallacy (“magical thinking”). Hence, their inescapable conclusion is that your vote does not make a difference. Now, if you compare your ballot’s seeming lack of value to your transportation cost to get to the polling precinct, the amount of time you spent lining up, and the risk you took of dying because of dehydration (and if you were in Abra, of getting caught in the crossfire of warring political clans), wouldn’t you feel just a little bit crazy for even thinking of voting? No wonder many people end up selling their vote just to break even!
Then there is also the assertion of some that all of our current democratic voting methods are flawed. Even if we had perfectly run elections, none of our voting systems can still guarantee that the candidate truly most preferred by the people will be selected. In our recently concluded plurality elections, for example, it seems that Noynoy is the clear winner with approximately 40 percent of the vote. But what if all those who did not vote for Noynoy actually considered him as their last choice and tailender JC de los Reyes as their unanimous second choice? In this example of the so-called “voter’s paradox,” JC is actually preferred by 60 percent of the voters over Noynoy! Shouldn’t he then be the President-elect? Other democratic voting practices have also been shown to have similar deficiencies to the extent that the only “rational” system might be a dictatorship!
If either our vote doesn’t really count or if it’s paradoxically impossible to elect the candidate that we all really want in a democracy, then why do we still persist in voting? I don’t know. Maybe it’s habit or social pressure. Maybe elections amuse us just like basketball games or telenovelas. Maybe, in order to maintain our sanity in this mad world, we need to believe that our one insignificant vote can change our lives. Or maybe because just like playing the lotto, no matter how many times we’ve been sadly disappointed, we still cling to the hope that we will one day hit the jackpot and elect a true leader who will inspire us to rise above ourselves. Only time will tell if our most recent bet will pay out.
Right now, however, I’m just so happy that despite all the human errors of the COMELEC and Smartmatic, the much maligned Precinct Count Optical Scanner or PCOS still worked. They might not be so lucky next time and so they really better get their act together. But after the kilometric lines and all the blood, sweat, and tears, at least the dang machine didn’t reject too many ballots. And for accepting my vote and not letting me down, I dedicate this remixed version of the 1986 Shakin’ Stevens hit song Because I Love You to the PCOS...
...If I crossed a million oceans just to be with you
...If I climbed the highest mountain just to hold you tight
Would you ever let me down?
Well, I’m sorry if it sounds kinda sad
It’s just that I’m worried, so worried
That you’ll let me down
Because I love you, love you, love you
So don’t let me down
(Everybody now, this time with more feeling!)
PCOS I love you, love you, love you
You didn’t let me down
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Please e-mail your reactions to kindergartendad@yahoo.com.
