The Power and the Money

Philippine election postscript

 (A) The election in Lanao del Sur (where the shootout happened) has finally been declared a failure, largely I suspect because the video went viral. 

(B) Erap (Estrada) is making noises about fraud. Just because they are opportunistic doesn’t mean they are wrong. But I suspect that even if they are right, they won’t generate enough furor to challenge Aquino’s win.

(C) I forgot to mention that when I asked most interviewees what they hoped would change as a result of the elections, they said an end to the economic crisis, in particular lower food and basic good prices. One person has related a story of US AID dogfood mixed with dirt being served in hard hit indigenous communities a few years ago. Poverty sucks.

(D) Spent last day in urban garbage scavenger communities, near Smokey Mountain 2, interviewing Bayan Muna activists. Big fear of evictions and typhoons. Bayan Muna gets its political leverage in Manila slums by offering secure titling. Urban pigsties are the savings accounts of choice, holding up to ₱10,000 per pig in porcine wealth.

Erica Field has an interesting paper on the returns to slum titles. Using data from Peru, she finds that titles increase investment in slum housing, but not because they slumdwellers get more access to credit. Rather, it seems to be due to a lowered fear of eviction.

(E) My earlier post on coercion as a general purpose technology was unclear: I just meant that when there are men with guns in play, they can get used in unforeseen ways, like the local Chamber of Commerce being able to threaten violence.

(F) Apparently one of the only ways of distinguishing the military from the NPA in the countryside is that the latter wear crocs instead of military boots. Who would have thought those hideous pastel sandals would be insurgent footwear of choice?

The Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao

 Here are some final comments about the Philippine election. Thank you, Noel!

NOEL: I certainly hope you become a regular here, Suresh! So does at least one reader. It isn’t like you don’t have a lot to say ...

This crazy electoral gunfight video is from the PIOM delegation to the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Somebody tried to expel partisan poll watcher, which started a fight. Guns were whipped out, shooting started, and one person was killed due from shrapnel. (No one seems to have been directly shot.) Strangely, somebody hauled off a PCOS voting machine during the melee.

Apparently, Comelec doesn’t use the term “electoral violence” to describe violence during elections in the ARMM, because it’s between rival families and clans. But the report of the PIOM team that went there was an endless litany of very bad things: Election workers not even showing up to some very large precincts. The rejection of electronic voting refused because of fears that the immediate public tally would prompt violence. Election fixing — one candidate received ₱20,000 to drop out of the race. Seals broken on the electronic ballot boxes. People taking money on their way into the voting area. Hell, snack distribution by one candidate triggered a fight, and 3 bombs went off in other polling areas ... thankfully, nobody was hurt.

I don’t really understand the situation in the ARMM, but that’s gotta be a textbook case of elections in a weak state. Interestingly, the area where the videoed gunfight broke out is still counting votes, indicating that the election is NOT considered a failure.

U.S. troops have been deployed in the ARMM to hunt down Abu-Sayyed, including the creation of military outposts. It may not be a stretch to think of ARMM as a Latin American country, albeit with its own unique Islamic blend of U.S. military bases, bullets and ballots that created such problems in Colombia.

Our final PIOM report and other stuff can be found here.

Coercion as a general-purpose technology

 One of our delegations reported in with a picture of a letter from the Bicol Business Council that said, “We know you are financed by the NPA. Stop working with them or else. We know you have a family.” Not exactly a friendly reminder from the local chamber of commerce.

I’m reminded of a conversation with Jim Robinson where we discussed the idea of coercion as a general purpose technology. No matter the reason you put men with guns on the ground, they can be used for lots of things, including the interests of the local elites.

That is why counterinsurgency is so dangerous. The strategy entails the increased use of troops and intermixing them into everyday life. Unless the troops both fully understand the local situation and are truly impartial, canny locals can often get them to do their dirty work for them. The flip side is even more dangerous. When the official forces possess limited local knowledge, the temptation is huge to empower and legitimize private armies raised by local landlords to “keep their land values high peace.”

Hacienda Luisita

 One group went to Hacienda Luisita, which I blogged about earlier as owned by a clan connected to Aquino and embroiled in the violent killing of striking workers.

Interestingly, a bunch of voting machines all coincidentally failed at about 12:58pm, and were still not working as of 3:45 pm. The Hacienda is 6,000 hectares and encompasses multiple barangays, but, interestingly, this economic power did not translate into an overwhelming vote for Aquino. Some labor union leaders were told “If Noynoy wins, you better watch out.” The union recognized that if Aquino won, any hope of legal redress or land reform of this hacienda would go out the window. It seems that it was strong enough to convince its members to vote against Aquino in numbers large enough to swamp the mysteriously failing voting machines. 

We have been told that the source of the 2004 labor conflict was an attempt by the Luisita management to rezone the area in order to escape the land reform law. They bundled shares in the Hacienda with their labor contract, so that their employees were actually counted as owners. Therefore, they were not eligible for land reform under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Genius!

Bad representation, proportional representation, and military persecution in the Philippines

 The Congress of the Philippines, like the American one, is divided into two houses. The upper house, like the American one, is elected in a crazy way. It’s a different form of crazy, though. Every three years, half the 24-person Senate is elected at-large, with all the problems that entails. At least now there’s a ballot, instead of having people write in their favorite candidates.

The lower house is elected by a combination of first-past-the-post and proportional representation. The districts are pretty straightforward, although their populations can vary wildly between 1,559,641 people in the 2nd district of Quezon City, with a few as small as 50,000. Why the disparity? First, the constitution mandates that each province receives at least one district. Second, there hasn’t been any redistricting (other than the creation of new provinces) since 1987. The reason for the latter is left as an exercise for the reader.

Dakilang Isagani, Mapa na nagpapakita ng populasyon ng mga distritong pangkonggreso, ayon sa resulta ng bilangang isinagawa noong Agosto 1, 2007 at inilathala noong Abril 2008, Wikimedia Commons.

Voters get to cast a second ballot for a political party. The parties will divvy up 20% of the House seats, with two caveats: to get a seat, a party needs to get at least 2% of the national vote, and no party can receive more than three seats. In the 2010 election, there will be 219 districts and 54 party-list seats. The party-lists are decided by such narrow margins that they don’t release the results until all the precinct votes are in.

 
The above is an Armed Forces flyer reading, “Don’t vote for the NPA party-lists,” followed by a list of organizations, including one we talked to earlier. One thing that came out of our interviews is that the military seems to target party-list candidates, who are more progressive on average. I wonder if this is a tragic real-world test of the hypotheses (made by many people, but here is a paper by Iversen and Soskice) that proportional representation is better for pro-redistribution candidates. After all, why else would repression be targeted against the candidates that win the PR seats?

Post Election notes

 Today I’m heading back to Manila to compile the report with the other PIOM delegations, and then returning to the U.S. on Sunday. I don’t think there was any national-level credibility-shattering fraud. We observed fairly placid polls, at least by Philippine standards. The people I’ve talked to so far report the same. So far, the press seems to be corroborating my own observations.

 
There have been incidents of post-election violence. A bit north of here, in Mindanao’s Compostela Valley, its terribly unequal plantation belt, NPA guerillas killed 4 soldiers and 2 poll workers who were transporting memory chips. Call it the AES-era analogue of burning a ballot box. I’m curious if there anything particular at stake in Maragusan, or if the attack was simply an NPA show of force.

We’ve been hosted by a Philippine NGO, the People’s Movement for Change, or Pagbabago. I asked them what they thought about the election. Firstly, they believed the Aquino victory was anticipated. Second, Arroyo is going to retain substantial power, in part through her appointments to the judiciary and in part by the fact that her allies will likely retain control of Congress.  They also think that U.S. backing of Aquino was key to the outcome. That came as a surprise. They claimed (IMHO plausibly) that the U.S. Embassy set up meetings between Aquino and various domestic and foreign players, which secured the funds and vote banks needed to cement victory. It is true that the candidates regularly met Embassy officials.

If the national election outcome was foreordained — and if little substantive is likely to change with the new administration, given that its social base is basically the same as th old government   — then what is the point of monitoring the polls? The best answer is that there is value in documenting all the pre-election nastiness that goes down out the rural areas. Hopefully, it will draw international attention to the intimidation that routinely occurs in non-election times.

Notes on poll watching

 I still haven’t seen the news. (I’m out in the sticks without internet; Noel is getting these posts third hand, in a process involving scrawled missives, motorcycles, and carrier pigeons.) But here are some observations on the poll watching and interviews around Santa Cruz.

Long lines. One booth had a voting machine breakdown for 3 hours, others were just plain backed up. But people were waiting up to 5 hours to vote. The election has the flavor of a festival, with people hanging around long after they’ve voted to meet extended family.  So people just take whatever time they need to complete this most important of political rituals. I.e., I don’t think turnout was much deterred by the long lines.

Lots of flagrant rule breaking. Like party workers (called poll watchers) in the voting area, helping people fill out their ballots and enforcing the 3-kg of rice/100 pesos-per-vote contracts that are a guilty secret for many people here. The local police vests had a candidate’s name “Dockie” printed on it, who also happens to be the vest supplier. Also, many people missing from the rolls, finding that they had “already voted” or unable to find their name (and finding the names of long dead relatives) on the voting lists.

Nonetheless, overall impressions of the election were optimistic. This turned to frustration over the course of the day as the lines and crowded rooms took their toll. At the end of the day, two out of five machines in my precinct failed to electronically transmit their votes; the chips were sent to the municipal canvassing office. 

While our small group, by the nature of our task, is hyper sensitive and paranoid about possible electoral chicanery, I think this is as good as it gets in rural underdeveloped countries. The bubblesheets were certainly an improvement over the old Senate ballots, which involved writing in the names (or nicknames) of the preferred twelve candidates, with all the room for fraud that implies. The local canvasser told another group member that this was the best election he’s seen in 35 years.  

Political dynasties

 I asked the new mayor of Davao, who is the daughter of the old mayor (and new vice-mayor) what she thought about political dynasties, given that the Philippine constitution has a clause authorizing Congress to legislate against them. 

She said: (a) well, anyone can run in the election and (b) you have George Bush 1 and 2, no? Sigh.

The electoral left and the insurgency in the Philippines

 Just met with Joel Virador, an ex-congressman now running for city council in Davao. While a congressman, he was charged with participating in the armed struggle, which was kind of crazy given that he was in Congress when the supposed acts occurred. This is a recent tactic of the AFP; charging leftist activists and politicians (I’ve met 3 that are on the run from the army here in Mindanao) with “frustrated murder” and participation in the NPA, a designated “communist-terrorist” organization. Once so charged, they become subject to Oplan Bantay Laya 2, a counterinsurgency program explicitly modeled on the Phoenix Program used by the United States in South Vietnam between 1967 and 1972.

Oplan Bantay Laya 2 divides military operations into four stages: military operations to “clear” the area of insurgents, “hold” the area by forming paramilitary groups and an intelligence network; “consolidate” the area through civic action operations such as medical and dental missions; and “develop” the area by introducing livelihood and development projects. 

The difficulty of reconciling the first two phases of the counterinsurgency plan with electoral democracy is obvious. As the counterinsurgency program gets more muscle, the left takes a beating. In Negros, the results have been horrifying. It is notable that, at least of the admittedly select folks I’ve met, none have repudiated the NPA or condemn them. Despite the personal (one guy is dealing with a slew of health problems) and political costs these courageous people have borne by being tarred with the “insurgent” label, they refuse to condemn the NPA or sanction government counterinsurgency programs.

The problems of Philippine democracy, though, go beyond military abuses. Discussing politics with Jose has been confirming my working mental model of the effects of persistent inequality, probably mathed up best by Acemoglu and Robinson. (My co-blogger has written a little about similar models, although mostly in non-democratic contexts.) It postulates a clientelism trap, where elites control votes via their control over key economic assets, and then use that vote bank to stymie any (political or economic) redistribution that would threaten the value of those assets. Land reform, foreign debt repudiation, tax enforcement, and urban infrastructure development all fail in the Philippines because Congress is filled with the rich, who realize most of these programs will eat the flow of rents they enjoy from their assets. It’s simple, pessimistic, and maybe a bit left-wing, but that does not mean it is wrong.

Styles of repression, repression in style

 Counterinsurgency is a strange branch of military operations. The New York Times recently published an article suggesting that the overuse of powerpoint presentations was hurting the American war effort. Well, the Philippine military has developed a somewhat more “productive” use of the technology. One favored tactic by the AFP is to force poor people to watch anti-communist powerpoint shows, countering the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army (NPA) ... and by extension progressive movements, leftist party-lists, and labor unions. Besides the clear human rights violation presented by forcing people to endure powerpoint presentations, this reminds me of the tactics employers use in campaigning against union-recognition elections in the United States. 

There is a longer meditation here on the political use of sovereign power. Sovereignty implies a state has control over people in its territory, just as private property and the labor contract imply the boss has control over people in his firm. If there’s interest, I’ll write it. Right now, I just wanted to point out that terribly non-democratic practices work even in the absence of outright fraud and the presence of the secret ballot.

Now it gets interesting

 I’m on a plane to Mindanao, which IMHO is the most interesting large island in the Philippines. Mindanao’s real estate is parceled up into local landlord fiefdoms (most notably the Ampatuan clan in Maguindanao), Dole banana plantations, Aussie mining companies, a large autonomous Muslim area, and insurgent controlled territory, under both the nationalist MILF and communist NPA. The combination of high stakes and ruthless players makes it no wonder that elections are contested with guns as well as money.

The local elections in the city of Davao seem like an almost stereotypical contest between different clientelist elites. The incumbent mayor, linked to anti-criminal death squads, is attempting to swap places with the current vice-mayor, who also happens to be his daughter. The opposition mayoral candidate is Prospero Nograles, who was chief of staff of the Arroyo administration. The Arroyo administration, I should add, also has their own death squads targeting activists in the area. Charming characters all around. But we will be meeting the two Bayan Muna city council candidates this afternoon. So let’s see what they say. 

Bayan Muna is a vaguely-leftish opposition party founded in 1999. In 2007, the national police arrested Satur Ocampo, one of the party’s three representatives, on murder charges related to the NPA’s execution of three alleged government informers on Leyte in 1984 ... when Ocampo was being held in jail by President Marcos. After an outcry, the Supreme Court ordered Ocampo released. The Arroyo administration later admitted to fabricating the charges.   

The Armed Forces have just been deployed to Davao, after a petition to Comelec by Nograles and another local politico. The official line is that this is to keep things “in order” for the election. But it’s also probably to intimidate people before the election and swing it for the administration. Can the two things be meaningfully distinguished in a place like Mindanao?

More when we land.

“Security by obscurity” in the Philippine elections

 One of the most interesting components of the current Philippine elections is the introduction of electronic voting. (It’s called the “Automated Election System,” or AES in the acronym-happy local idiom.) Instead of paper ballots tallied by hand at the precinct, the AES has people fill out bubbles on a sheet. (This immediately invoked my private traumas with standardized tests.) A computer then reads the bubblesheets and transmits the tallies to the next highest level of vote aggregation. E.g., results from a barangay (probably best translated as “ward”) go to the municipality (actually a county in North American terms), and then to the province and finally the national election commission, called Comelec. The system is intended to stop the long-standing practice of dagdag bawas, literally “add-subtract,” whereby zeros are creatively appended (and other digits somehow dropped) in order to favor particular candidates during the tally. 

All good in theory. But technology alone can’t beat the political animal. The implementation of the vote machines, which are designed by a private company SmartTec, has been ... fraught. It raises a few general questions about technology, democratic legitimacy, and the regulation of public-private partnerships. 

The initial AES law had a number of clauses guaranteeing security of the vote and providing for pilot projects. Comelec has ignored most of these in implementing the AES. For example, Section 12 of Republic Act 8436 (as amended) states: “Once an AES technology is selected for implementation, the Commission shall promptly make the source code of that technology available and open to any interested political party or groups which may conduct their own review thereof.” The idea was that the code could then be stress-tested and debugged by a global army of recreational hackers. Comelec, however, has kept the code under wraps. Not only has it not been made public, it hasn’t even been made available to AESWatch, a highly-qualified federation of local groups! Rather, Comelec outsourced the testing to U.S. companies at a price tag of ₱7 million. Whether this reflects partisan pro-Arroyo bias, institutional politics, or just plain old bureaucratic incompetence is not yet clear to me. The cipherpunks and open source community long ago argued that “security by obscurity” doesn’t work to protect software systems. 

The rub is that voting technology is not just any software system! What elections do (to crib from Jim Fearon) is legitimize a government by making it common knowledge that the ruling group has enough support to take on all comers. Since the technical e–voting issues are beyond the grasp of the general non-hacking public, it is REALLY important that local technical experts, ideally drawn from a broad social base, give the election technology a thumbs-up. This kind of legitimacy is exactly the kind of thing the private sector, however efficient and low-cost, can’t provide. It comes from a social knowledge base of recreational political geekery. In the fraud infested environment of the Philippines (and other developing countries experimenting with electronic voting), everyone is suspicious of the new technology. 

Open-sourcing the underlying code wouldn’t just have helped to insure the elections against nefarious technical manipulation; it would have created legitimacy for the Philippine democratic process V2.0.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Instead, we face the possibility of the “imponderable, unthinkable and unimaginable” should the system fail ... or worse yet, the possibility that the results will be rejected by powerful groups even if it does not.

Suresh Naidu blogs the Philippine elections!

 I’m Suresh Naidu, a friend and colleague of Noel. I’ll be guest-blogging the upcoming Philippine elections.

 

I’m here in Manila with the NLG component of the People’s International Observers Mission (not as a lawyer, but a fellow traveler). The PIOM is a coordinating group for international election observers, and they are getting us up to speed before sending the 80+ internationals out in teams to various parts of the country on Sunday. (Mine is Mindanao in the south.) 

We’re on day 2 of our orientation, and yesterday we got a rundown on Philippine politics and what’s at stake in this election. Two things that need to be established right off the bat: (A) The Philippines is terribly unequal and poor (ranked 105 in the Human Development Index), with a plantation based agricultural sector and a nascent foreign-owned service economy. (B) The government’s policy options all waft out from a noxious cauldron of repression, foreign debt service, and corruption.  

The standard academic story (which is probably right) is that Philippine politics is a Frankenstein of local clans and patronage networks welded into political machines by national politicians. Local landowners use their economic (and paramilitary) power to secure votes, in the classic Latin American fashion, and then combine these vote banks across clans and coalitions to form national electoral blocs. The result is that virtually all of Congress is landlord (either urban or rural) controlled, and all the presidential candidates come from the same landowning elite. 

Need proof? Imelda Marcos is running for the Congress in her family stronghold of Ilocos Norte, in northern Luzon. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is running for the Senate, which is elected at-large. Meanwhile, the likely winner of the presidential poll, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino (son of former president Cory Aquino), is not just the owner of any plantation in Central Luzon ... he is the owner of the Hacienda Lucita, the site of a 2004 massacre of striking workers.

The incumbent president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA as the acronym-loving population has dubbed her), has epitomized the worse features of Philippine politics, being cartoonishly kleptocratic and corrupt. She is also very good at the Philippine political game. She has faced down impeachment proceedings and coup attempts.

GMA managed to get the Philippines branded the most corrupt country in Asia, and her the most corrupt president in Philippine history. (I would still give that title to Ferdinand Marcos.) In addition, she has stacked the electoral body and the Supreme Court with her allies and used the military to persecute the only source of political innovation permitted by the existing institutions: the left-wing party-lists, which contest the 20% of House seats that are open to “marginalized sectors” and elected at large.

In other words, the job of the election observers is cut out for us. Observers are no panacea for the underlying inequality and weak institutions that are the Philippine colonial inheritance. That said, independent electoral observers can improve the electoral process in the face of repression and widespread fraud. While it is a small contribution towards changing the balance of power between elites and citizens in the Philippines ... it is a small contribution towards the only thing that will ultimately allow badly needed reforms to occur.

More reports to come.