The quick count via the COMELEC’s transparency server shows Marcos Jr. on track to winning a 59% majority of the vote, a first since his father did it in 1965 with 51%.
Key to this commanding landslide victory is his alliance with Sara Duterte-Carpio, the daughter of the incumbent and soon-outgoing President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Roa Duterte. This alliance with Duterte allowed Marcos to cement support in Mindanao, crowding out Robredo from Regions 10 and 13 which she won in 2016.
Marcos also beat Robredo in key vote-rich areas which she won in 2016 particularly Region 4 (A and B) and Region 6 (Cebu), while consolidating his lead in regions that could have been competitive such as Region 3 (Central Luzon) and 8 (Eastern Visayas).
Central to this historical feat was a controversial election strategy where Marcos and Duterte shunned public debates and relied solely on command vote politics and savvy social media engineering to drive their narrative and build support.
More fundamentally, the Marcoses have been hard at work at revising their family’s historical record, presenting themselves as the harbinger of a lost golden age, luring in potential voters as early as 2010. Twelve years later, they reap the rewards in what is thus far our largest election with a 20% increase in registered voters from 2016 (54.4 then to 65.6 now) and a projected turnout of 80% which is on the high-side of our historical range of 75-80%.
Robredo put up a brilliant fight, especially in the latter stages of the campaign, with sterling rallies, inspiring volunteer mobilizations, and creative works of art and expression of all things pink. The intensity of the efforts however all came against the lingering sense that this has all come late, and that she and the opposition failed to build an effective coalition and to challenge the disinformation being built up against her during her six years as Vice-President.
So where do we go from here?
Procedurally, the votes will need to be officiated and certified. Provinces, cities, and municipalities shall be preparing their Certificates of Canvass which then get tallied again by the COMELEC. Then the results are submitted to Congress for them to certify and officially declare the President and Vice-President. By law, this process should be done in 30 days.
Barring wide scale anomalies or irregularities, we don’t foresee the result changing. Nevertheless, the process has been marred somewhat by reports of vote counting machine (VCM) malfunctions and errors, many well-documented and amplified on social media. Many precincts have had to deal with crowd control issues as well, a confluence of the sheer number of voters, the higher turn-out, and a pandemic that has kept many on edge.
What’s imperative now is for the COMELEC to maintain the trust of its main clientele: us citizens. While the Commission will explain that there have only been 1,867 recorded VCM issues out of 106,174 machines (1.7% error rate) the magnitude of the impact is much higher as almost a million voters (933k) stood to be affected by those issues (VCM machines times 500 or the average number of people in a clustered precinct). In a high-stakes election such as this where every vote counts, the integrity of the process matters.
By all accounts however, we’re looking at a President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. come June 30. What does that mean for us? There’s quite a lot to unpack.
We can talk soon about the Marcos restoration project and what we’ll need to be vigilant about. Our history will be rewritten — that is guaranteed — but what what can be more fundamentally changed are the institutions put in place by the 1987 constitution. Them changing the fundamental law of the land is in the cards given their sweeping mandate.
The longer view is that we are now, officially, an illiberal democracy. This is a term I first encountered as a political science student in college. Illiberal democracies hold elections but not much else beyond that; rule of law is weak and representation does not work as designed. Then we used Iraq as an example. So what does this mean now for our people and what can we expect?
If past is prologue, we know what we’re about to get into. To co-opt a now popular turn of phrase, we may not be getting into the exciting part.
Here, Now 