Comelec slams door on Aquino term extension

THE Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Tuesday shot down plans to amend the Constitution to pave the way for President Benigno Aquino 3rd to extend his term beyond 2016, saying there is no more time to tinker with the Charter.

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. said the national elections will proceed in 2016 because the only way for the electoral exercise to be postponed is through Charter change.

“Whatever happens, there is no way that there can be no elections. There may be some adjustments, but we will have elections in 2016,” the Comelec chief told reporters after attending a hearing by the Senate committee on finance on the proposed P16.9-billion budget of the poll body for 2015.

Brillantes said the Comelec has been preparing for the 2016 elections.

The United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) earlier accused Malacañang of floating a no- election scenario as part of attempts to extend the term of the President.

Aquino, in a television interview, had said he is open to Charter change or Cha-cha to allow him to seek another term.

But Brillantes said Congress cannot suspend the elections in 2016 because that would be unconstitutional.

”The only way to stop the elections is to amend the Constitution. I don’t think there is time to amend the Constitution,” the Comelec chairman noted.

UNA Secretary General Toby Tiangco claimed that the recent remarks of Malacañang spokesperson Edwin Lacierda on the possibility of a “no-election” scenario in 2016 reflect efforts of the Aquino administration and the Roxas-Abad (Manual Roxas 2nd-Florencio Abad) faction in the ruling Liberal Party (LP) to derail democratic processes in order to perpetuate Aquino in power.

The opposition believes that the dismal showing of their 2016 bets in the surveys is the reason why the administration has floated term extension through Cha-cha.

Meanwhile, Brillantes said the poll body will be using Optical Mark Reader (OMR) system technology in the 2016 elections. OMR employs the same technology used by the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines.

The poll body is also planning to use the PCOS machines that were used in the 2013 elections. The Comelec chief, however, stressed the need to procure 6,000 additional counting machines to augment the 80,000 machines in its inventory.

Stop Cha-cha debates
At the House of Representatives, an ally of the President sought the suspension of debates on constitutional amendments that seek to lift the 40-percent restriction on foreign ownership of public utilities.

Rep. Walden Bello of Akbayan party-list made the call during his interpellation of Rep. Mylene Garcia-Albano, who defended a resolution calling for economic amendments in her capacity as the chairman of the committee on constitutional amendments.

Bello said lawmakers should stop their debates on the issue since the government is yet to solve the country’s land distribution and titling problems. He cited the uncompleted Cadastral Survey in 1913 that would have determined boundaries of each city, municipality and province as stated by the President in his fifth State of the Nation Address (SONA) in July.

“This [Charter change] will make it more difficult to address this problem. It is pretty clear that this seeks to undermine, if not subvert, the constitutional ban on foreign ownership of land. We should really postpone this for practical reasons. We should not put the cart before the horse,” Bello pointed out.

Albano-Garcia, however, disagreed, saying the completion of the Cadastral Survey is already being addressed by the Aquino administration.

“Our objective here is not to grant full foreign ownership of land. We just want to allow Congress to have certain flexibility in formulating economic policies and give some leeway to government to address the exigencies of the times. I don’t agree that we should hold this in abeyance while other problems are being addressed by the executive department,” she added.

But Bello refused to back down, saying China and Vietnam managed to score economic growth despite a constitutional ban on foreign ownership of land, among others.

“These are the two of the most dynamic economies in East Asia. The ban on foreign ownership is not a hindrance to development and the foreign investors have learned to live with it and move forward,” the lawmaker noted.

But Garcia-Albano countered that China’s ban on foreign ownership is not really absolute since it allows foreigners to lease land for as long as 99 years.

source:  Manila Times

TV networks and election spending

NO ONE really ever talks about advertising spending during elections - first because it’s a highly regulated activity understood only by a small number of political consultants; and second because it’s a bit of a dark art, built around finding ways to skirt the COMELEC’s rules creatively.

This need to be creative in the face of regulatory vigilance explains why every election season sees politicians appearing on every advertising platform imaginable, from cans of tuna to the backs of buses, posing as product endorsers rather than candidates. In recent years they have also turned in large numbers to social media, their supporters doing the heavy lifting of sharing across their friends networks to get the message out.

But any politician with national ambitions will need to advertise on television at some point, and television is the weak point in the political establishment’s attempts to keep spending under wraps. That is because local television happens to be dominated by two networks, both of them listed companies obliged to disclose their financial statements. And when these networks’ profits drop in non-election years, they will not hesitate to blame “the absence of election spending” for the decline. From their publicly-available disclosures, it is thus possible to quantify the impact of election ads on their financial results, as we shall see from the chart below.

The first obvious takeaway from the chart is that election spending doesn’t seem to affect revenue much. Ad slots are finite, after all; you can only squeeze so much advertising airtime from so many hours in a day. The sharpest practitioners know this, and have found ways to show you advertising at the slightest pretext. If for instance you’ve ever seen a UAAP game on television, ABS-CBN will show you sponsored moments with every steal, every block, every fast break. But at the end of the day, there are only so many slots to fill, so the game becomes finding ways to make ads as profitable for the network as possible. 

That seems to be what happened in the last election season. A look at the chart shows that on the profit level, election spending had a far more dramatic impact than revenue. The picture that emerges is that election ad income falls directly to the bottom line as pure profit. Thus GMA Network’s profit dropped by about half in the year since we last went to the polls. ABS-CBN, meanwhile, performed its own analysis and concluded that the impact of election spending was nearly P728 million, significantly larger than the profit it booked from non-election activities.


source:  Businessworld