For our serious consideration, please…

The registration for overseas Filipinos has been moved from October to December 9. Please take note of this very important information and kindly relay to as many as you can.

Let us encourage all those who are abroad among our family, relatives, and friends to register and exercise their right to vote. While many responded and actively voted in the last election, we need to encourage more of our overseas Kababayans to register and vote.

Embassies also have to prioritize reaching out to Filipinos abroad. We commend efforts being made to facilitate voter's registration and voting as well by very pro-active diplomatic officials. We need more of these officials who realize the important value of suffrage.

Will it be worth casting our vote in the next election?

So many have filed their candidacies. Who among these do we elect to serve our people and lead our country? It is easy to know who the nuisance candidates are. What about the so-called serious candidates, do we know enough about them to be able to discern and decide who to vote for next year?

Let us encourage all to carefully know and scrutinize the contenders in terms of their track record of public service, honesty, and active faith in God.

This time around, we need to include the issue of loyalty to our country and the physical and mental fitness of candidates.

Are the candidates there for our people or their families? Do they have serious issues about corruption, hidden wealth, or unaccounted public funds? Can their leadership inspire our people and lead our country closer to God?

We do not seem to have asked ourselves this last question as a people. We boast about being a predominantly God-worshipping country but have we included God in our selection of this country's leaders?

There are still so many reminders for voters not to be swayed by cash handed out to them by candidates and their supporters especially as elections draw near. One latest FB post showed a child of the politician resting luxuriously on top of a pile of money while a child of the poor voter who sold his vote wallowed in deeper poverty.

Church leaders have also been actively campaigning for honest elections, reminding the people to reject any offer of money in exchange for votes. This time around, some church leaders have been very vocal about rejecting the corrupt and the dishonest. Perhaps the church, religious, women, youth organizations and schools can sponsor sessions that will engage all to seriously study and scrutinize the records and public performance of the candidates. Media can play a very important role as well in disseminating valuable information about the candidates, especially for the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency.

Reliable experts can also share their knowledge to guide us in knowing the candidates better. Recently, for example, a noted psychologist asked Miriam Santiago to publish, to make public the records of her lung cancer condition. As an expert, she consulted other studies that showed the very slim chance of stage 4 lung cancer patients to survive.

If Santiago truly survived her lung cancer, then knowing about her real condition and the factors that may have allowed her to survive the serious cancer threat may inspire other similarly-affected cancer patients to hold on and not give up. Even if God's healing hand is invoked as the miracle cure for her lung cancer, still, all Filipinos are entitled to know her real health condition. Unlike her witty remarks and her books full of jokes, the position of President is very important for our nation. What if her cancer recurs? How long can she stay alive and healthy as President?

Which brings us to the question, why did she decide to run now? Wasn't it only recently that she said she was at the point of death? Now she dramatically decides to run. Why? And how did she decide on her vice presidential candidate? What did she do during martial law and what does she think about the martial law regime?

For sure, there are more questions we want answered not only by Santiago but by other candidates as well. We hope there can be a serious forum or several fora where Filipino voters can be allowed to further and more seriously study and scrutinize every candidate so that this time around, our voters will vote based on issues and performance and with God's guidance.