Why ban when you can't enforce it?

Posted on April 1, 2007 - Filed Under , , |

THOSE pesky billboards and signages to include tarpaulin streamers of personalities along city and town roads are still there, almost a week after the candidates have filed their certificates with the Commission on Elections.

Their continuing presence – and assault of our finer senses — serve as a reminder that most of the laws on elections this side of the Pacific are honored more in the breach than in the observance. The Comelec offices perhaps, having already put behind them the task of accepting and processing the candidates’ certificates, can now step outside to tear down or dismantle such thinly-disguised  campaign materials  along with candidates posters sprouting in otherwise prohibited places.

It is so simple a task – and yet so complicated.The initial fervor and daring with which Comelec chair Benjamin Abalos had the poll body’s deputized agents descending on and removing those illegal campaign materials at the start of the senatorial campaign in the country appears to have worn off – and especially so in the countryside. 

As of  the past two days after  the certificate filing ended when we last looked,  the walls and electric posts in Dagupan are starting to fill with waving, smiling images of  various characters  seemingly taunting those in authority to come and get ‘em.

Now, if the poll body cannot – will not – really implement the provisions of its own laws, why put it there at all? The most natural thing to do is scrap these altogether.

No prohibition, no violation.

In the first place, the law on common poster areas, as many Pinoys will readily tell you, is a hare-brained idea doomed to fail even before it was first implemented. Outlawing fires and typhoons would have had a much better chance of success.            

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