HERE’S an excerpt from Neal Cruz’s Philippine Daily Inquirer column piece:
MANILA, Philippines - This is it, the moment of truth! Today is the time to exercise your right to choose your leaders. Go to the voting precincts and vote for your candidates. Choose the candidates who you think will serve your community best.
Don’t sell your vote. The candidate who offers, directly or indirectly, to buy your vote is no good. He is not yet in office and he is already violating the law. If you vote for him and he wins, he will do more of the same. He will bribe his way through life. He is corrupting you. He is one of the persons who cause so much corruption in our government. And he is one reason you and many others are suffering.
If you accept his offer, you yourself will be violating the law. The law punishes not only the vote-buyer but also the vote-seller, that’s you. For a few hundred pesos you will spend a number of days in jail. You will have a prison record, a blot on your reputation for as long as you live. You will be called a “jailbird, an ex-convict.” All for a few hundred pesos, which would be spent and gone by tomorrow anyway. And you will have that nagging guilty feeling for the rest of your life.
Check out INQUIRER.net’s Eleksyon 2007 running account.
