WHEN your vote becomes merchandise, you become the merchandise.
A grandmother in rural Bohol opens a brown envelope and finds ₱10,000 cash inside. Her monthly pension is ₱2,400. The money represents four months of survival. The politician smiles warmly, shakes her weathered hand, and moves to the next house. What he purchased isn’t her vote—he purchased her desperation. What she sold isn’t her ballot—she sold her grandchildren’s future.
This scene played out across Bohol during the last election season. Reports documented vote-buying amounts ranging from ₱50 to ₱10,000 per voter, transforming our province into an open-air market where citizenship was the commodity and poverty was the sales pitch. European Union election observers didn’t need sophisticated monitoring—the transactions were as obvious as vendors hawking bananas at Dao market.
The Mathematics of Moral Bankruptcy
In a typical municipality of 30,000 voters, if half received ₱10,000, the candidate spent ₱150 million on vote-buying alone. This money flows from infrastructure kickbacks, ghost projects, inflated contracts—funds that should have built flood controls or upgraded health centers.
The mathematical horror deepens: every peso of vote-buying money returns multiplied by ten. The candidate who spends ₱150 million buying votes must steal ₱1.5 billion from public coffers to break even. Your ₱10,000 envelope costs the community ₱100,000 in stolen opportunities. You’ve been paid to rob yourself.
Consider the psychology behind different price points. The ₱50 voter sells their voice for one meal. The ₱500 voter mortgages civic duty for a week’s groceries. But the ₱10,000 voter? They’ve been targeted as someone whose principles have a clearly marked price tag, whose loyalty can be purchased like a sack of rice.
The Scriptural Indictment: Modern-Day Esau
Scripture offers the devastating parallel of Esau, who sold his birthright for a bowl of stew (Genesis 25:29-34). Every Boholano who accepts vote-buying money reenacts Esau’s foolish mistake—selling your birthright as a free citizen for temporary relief. But unlike Esau’s stew, vote-buying money creates an appetite that devours itself.
The prophet Amos thunders against those who “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 2:6). What do we call voters who sell themselves?
Jesus confronted money changers in the temple because they turned sacred space into marketplace (Matthew 21:12-13). Our polling stations are democracy’s temples, yet we’ve allowed them to become bazaars where votes are traded like rice.
What ₱10,000 Actually Buys
That envelope doesn’t just buy your vote—it purchases your complicity in systematic extortion. You’ve agreed to smile when the candidate cuts ribbons on ₱50-million road projects costing ₱30 million. You’ve agreed to stay silent when road repairs materialize because funds were “realigned” to personal accounts. You’ve agreed to watch your neighbor’s child die from preventable illness because rural health units lack medicines—medicines that could have been purchased with money instead spent buying your vote.
That ₱10,000 transforms you from citizen into accomplice, from voter into victim, from stakeholder in democracy into shareholder in corruption. The candidate didn’t pay ₱10,000 for your vote—they paid you to become their partner in crime.
The Grotesque Theater of False Generosity
Watch the choreographed dance: candidates arrive with theatrical fanfare—convoys, blaring music, entourages. They distribute rice, sardines, cash with magnanimous air. This performance masks sinister transaction. The candidate isn’t giving you their money—they’re returning a tiny fraction of what they plan to steal. It’s like a pickpocket who steals your wallet, hands back ₱20, then expects gratitude.
Vote-buying inverts the relationship between leaders and citizens. Instead of earning trust through competence, they purchase submission through manufactured dependency. They don’t want informed voters making rational choices—they want economic hostages making desperate compromises.
The Cascading Destruction
Vote-buying metastasizes through community life like acid on social fabric. When votes become commodities, everything follows suit. Teachers sell grades. Police auction protection. Doctors prescribe based on kickbacks rather than medical need.
Children absorb these lessons with devastating clarity: principles are negotiable, integrity is optional, success comes from strategic corruption rather than hard work. They watch parents count vote-buying money and conclude citizenship is business transaction rather than civic responsibility.
Trust itself dies. Social cohesion dissolves into paranoid calculations about who owes what to whom. Local businesses suffer as public contracts become political rewards rather than competitions based on merit. Economic development stagnates because investors avoid communities where rule of law has been replaced by rule of highest bidder.
The Alternative Vision
Imagine a different Bohol—where candidates earn votes through policy proposals rather than cash distributions. Picture town halls where citizens grill candidates about disaster preparedness, economic development, healthcare delivery. Envision elections where the candidate with the best ideas wins, regardless of personal wealth.
This isn’t utopian fantasy. It’s how democracy functions in communities that refuse to sell civic responsibility. It’s how progress happens where citizens demand competence rather than generosity, where voters ask “What will you do?” instead of “What will you give?”
Such communities exist within the Philippines—municipalities where infrastructure gets built on schedule and within budget, provinces where hospitals have medicines and schools have textbooks. The difference isn’t resources or geography. The difference is citizens who refuse to participate in democracy’s auction.
The Personal Reckoning
If you accepted vote-buying money in May 2025, ask yourself: What did I actually purchase? Did it buy better roads, improved public utilities, enhanced healthcare? Or did it simply delay hunger while making problems permanently worse?
What did I sell? I sold my right to complain when public services fail. I sold my children’s right to inherit functional democracy. I sold my community’s chance to attract honest leaders who deliver real progress rather than mere handouts.
Every peso of vote-buying money carries fingerprints of future suffering—the child who will die because health funds were stolen, the student who will lack textbooks because education budgets were plundered, the family who will lose homes to floods because drainage projects became profit centers.
The Covenant of Conscience
The next election will bring the same temptations. The same candidates will arrive with the same envelopes. The same desperate circumstances will make their offers seem reasonable.
But now you know the true cost. Now you understand that accepting their money makes you complicit in your community’s systematic destruction. Now you recognize vote-buying is not generosity but extortion disguised as assistance.
The choice before Bohol is stark: Continue being a province where democracy goes to the highest bidder, or become a province that demonstrates corruption has limits, that principles matter, that some things truly are not for sale.
This choice cannot be postponed. Every day we delay, corruption deepens, problems multiply, costs increase. Our children are watching. Our ancestors are judging. God is waiting.
The question isn’t whether Bohol can change. The question is whether we have courage to acknowledge what we’ve become and choose to become something better.
That choice begins with simple commitment: Never again will I sell my vote. Never again will I trade my children’s future for temporary relief. Never again will I participate in democracy’s auction.
Make that commitment. Keep that commitment. Watch Bohol transform from cautionary tale into redemption story that inspires the nation.
The author writes from the heart of Bohol, with love for what we are and hope for what we can become. (Email: lucelllarawan@gmail.com).
