OBLIQUE OBSERVATIONS
By Atty. Gilberto Lauengco, J.D.
The 2025 edition of the national and local elections for various positions are over. The people have spoken. For the winning candidates, victory parties and back slapping have begun. Suddenly, everyone in the campaign and even those from outside the campaign come out of the woodworks to claim that they were the crucial factor in the winning campaign. What is worse even those form the opposing parties will suddenly proclaim that they secretly helped the winning candidate. For the losing candidates, finger pointing and the blame game will be the norm. Truly, victory has many fathers and defeat is often an orphan.
For all the candidates both winning and losing, there are still things that must be done. Despite the pain and trauma, even the losing candidates must comply with these post-election requirements. First, all candidates are required to submit the prescribed Statement of Contributions and Expenditures (SOCE) on or before June 11, 2025. Many candidates often forget or ignore the SOCE requirement. There are significant consequences of not filing the SOCE which includes potential disqualification to hold public office. For the winning candidate this may prevent the said candidate from taking office.
Second, all candidates must remove or take down all of their campaign materials and ads on social media on or before May 17, 2025. For those who will ignore the said requirement, the consequence for the erring candidate would be. Possible election offense case. For losing candidates these legal requirements might seem overly burdensome and unfair but is must be done to avoid the consequences.
Other than legal requirements there are also other matters which the said candidates must do especially for losing candidates who wish to run again in the next scheduled elections on 2028. It is said that the preparation for the next election starts immediately after the last election. Primary among these must do’s is to settle all debts to watchers and service providers. Other than ending and starting with a clean slate, settling these loose ends will prevent ill feelings from a candidate’s own team that can cause trouble in the future.
After settling the loose ends, both losing and winning candidates must conduct a post-election debriefing and analysis. Painful as it may be for the losing team, they must understand and know the reasons for losing. Essential for this exercise is the statement of votes that would show the results per clustered precinct. From this data the campaign team can extract their performance statistics in each barangay and even sitio or area within the said barangays. This would in turn allow the team to assess the performance of their ward leaders in the area. The successful leaders can be maintained while the other leaders can be replaced in the future or augmented with additional forces.
After a careful analysis, planning for the next election can then begin anew. There is a Japanese concept know as “kaizen”. Essentially it means taking small ongoing and incremental changes to achieve a long term goal. Today, all candidates and their teams must start anew by taking those first steps towards the next election.
