By tonight, the news tickers will start to crawl. Partial, unofficial. A name here, a dynasty there. The Commission on Elections will ask for patience. The winners will declare victory before the count is done. Their opponents will raise questions that won’t be answered. Their supporters will either fall silent or burn.
But all of that comes later. First, we vote.
This is not the kind of election we deserve. But it is the only one we have.
Three years into the Marcos-Duterte administration, there is little illusion left. What was branded as a unity ticket has degenerated into a live dispute over who gets to keep the state. Sara Duterte’s resignation from both DepEd and the NTF-ELCAC did not happen in a vacuum—it happened in a vacuum of discipline, where the so-called alliance proved to be nothing more than proximity. Their shared enemies could not outweigh their shared ambition.
And yet the system that enabled them remains untouched.
This election will not fix that system. It will not reverse the price hikes, bring justice to the murdered, or recover the years lost to the lockdown and disinformation. It will not hold any family accountable. It will not break the grip of patronage or end the normalization of impunity. But the worst thing we can do is pretend none of it matters.
Because it still does. Not in the way politics markets itself—grand changes, sweeping reforms—but in the more dangerous way: by slowly making us expect less.
Each cycle lowers the standard for what leadership looks like. Each dynasty normalized, each vote bought, each party-list hijacked turns democracy into something else: a contract we didn’t sign, a ballot that already filled itself out.
If that’s the system we’re stuck in, then that’s the system we resist.
Today is not about romanticizing the vote. It is about refusing to surrender it.
We are voting not because the system is clean, but because the alternative is silence, and this is exactly what those in power rely on.
The goal has never been just to win elections. The goal is to exhaust the public so thoroughly that even winning feels pointless.
We reject that. Not with naïveté, not with false hope, but with full knowledge of the facts: this election is deeply unfair.
Its playing field is rigged. Its watchdogs are under-resourced. Its frontrunners are entrenched. The machine runs on debt, fear, and repetition.
Still, we move.
Vote for candidates who have something to lose. Vote for those who stand to be hurt by the policies they oppose. Vote not just for the popular names, but for the names that speak clearly, not carefully. Vote for organizers. Vote for workers. Vote for the students who don’t yet have a seat, but knock anyway. Vote like the outcome isn’t guaranteed, because they’re counting on you thinking it is.
And if you cannot vote—if the process has shut you out—do not shut yourself down. Hold the line in other ways. Monitor. Document. Speak.
The vote is not the whole fight. It’s just the part that happens today.
We know this election is broken. But we are voting anyway.
Because if the only choice left is between surrender and struggle, we already know where we stand.
