As an ordinary layman, let me forward the thesis that the party list system – in praxis – is nothing but a paradox. Its claim to represent the ‘marginalized and underrepresented’ is a myth. Expanding their number by judicial fiat via a new formulation of proportional representation that radically abandons original formula ought to be doubly discomforting.

The Constitution is supposed to allow only 250 seats. And this having been filled to overflowing, both Congress and Supreme Court believe that any x number can be prescribed. The Senate president even tried to overinflate it to 350.

There isn’t any more any kind of ‘population control’ in Congress. What would stop Senate from increasing its membership to any number its heart desires?

So which one is the paradox?

People will soon discover, if they don’t know it by now, that one wins in a party list in such an easy way.

For example, in Legislative District X, Male Politician M runs as regular congressman. Female Politician N runs as party-list representative. When the votes were counted, 200,000 were counted to Male Pol M and not surprisingly, about the same number of votes, say 205,000 were counted to Female Pol N.

It turns out that Male Pol M and Female Pol N are actually husband and wife. In other words, the votes that went to the husband also went to the wife. They both won – a seat each in the House of Representatives.

Truth is, the lady is happy enough to share the room where she holds office to the husband, until a new room of his own would have been provided by the House of Representatives.

In this given illustration, what is made clear is the fact that there is always an easy mode nay a sort of a ‘backdoor entrance’ where a husband and a wife, a brother and a brother, a sister and a sister, or a father and a son, or a mother and a daughter can become elected by riding on the same ‘political carpet’.

Thus, legally enough, something is being circumvented. In short, any politician of genius can always go around a law so no law is actually being violated. It must be important to know how each of the party list who have participated in the last 2007 elections could have earned their votes: were it at large or were it district-generated?

Again, we are interested to know if Party List A, or PL B, or PL C – all alike – actually earned their votes not from the general population but from some local population alone. For if this be so, it means that any winnable regular congressman can tag along another of his own, say a brother or a sister.

Given this scenario, it is clear how one can hit two birds with just one stone. Serious observers of trends or legal scholars must try to really do a work in profiling. At the rate it has gone, we are seeing a pattern where supposedly new politicians actually come from the same families – over and over again.

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