Senator Leila de Lima on Tuesday is seeking to prevent abuse of the law allowing candidate substitutions during national and local elections.
De Lima, who is a former election lawyer, filed Senate Bill (SB) No. 2461 which seeks to impose limitations on substitution of candidates due to withdrawal.
“The Omnibus Election Code recognizes the importance of our party system and our political parties and therefore provides for an opportunity for political parties to replace their candidates before the elections,” she wrote in a dispatch from Camp Crame.
“It can readily be gleaned that the practice of substituting candidates with individuals who were not party members, but only belatedly, even up to the point of taking their oath as party member only on the date of the filing of the substitute certificate of candidacy, is an outright bastardization of the privilege of substitution accorded by the law to political parties,” she added.
De Lima’s bill stemmed from her frustration with some parties fielding placeholders or nominating persons who have no plans to pursue public office, then substituting them with a different candidate.
“In order to prevent this from happening, the COMELEC [Commission on Elections] should be able to determine whether these ‘placeholders’ are nuisance candidates in spite of substitution, which, in turn, would void the substitution by the political party which nominated them,” she said.
The measure also requires that the substitute of a candidate who backed out must already be a member of the political party at the filing of a certificate of candidacy.
“This would preclude the now prevalent practice of political parties filing nuisance candidacies of party members, but only as placeholders to strong and popular candidates of other political parties or who are otherwise independent, in anticipation that their political party will be the one eventually picked by the strong and prominent candidate,” she said.
“This practice of last-minute party-hopping or party-hunting during and even after the original COMELEC period for filing certificates of candidacies has ended must stop now, as it puts to shame even ordinary and regular party-hopping done several months or weeks before the filing of certificates of candidacy,” de Lima also said.
Despite ending the filing of candidacy last October, Comelec allowed substitution for a candidate in a national or local post until November 15, 2021.
Senate President Vicente Sotto III, himself, had also called for a review on this substitution rule for candidates who would withdraw. — DVM, GMA News
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