Senators on Monday aggressively pushed to reform the existing party-list system to keep political families, contractors, and regional parties from monopolizing congressional seats, thereby preserving them for marginalized and underrepresented sectors, to which the party-list law was originally created. 

Senate President Tito Sotto and Senator JV Ejercito lamented that the current system has increasingly deviated from the Party-List System Act (RA 7941) passed over three decades ago, citing the presence of several groups that do not genuinely represent the marginalized sectors. 

For instance, Sotto said provincial and regional groups must no longer be allowed to join the party-list race, given that they already have representation in the House of Representatives or their district congressman. 

The political parties, are they also considered marginalized? They already have a lot of [representation] in the Senate, in the House, provincial boards, and city councils,” Sotto stressed during the hearing of the Committee on Electoral Reforms and People’s Participation.

“So, I think we should really confine it back to the original law that we passed…which is, you must belong to the marginalized party.”

Sotto was then the vice chair of the Senate Committee on Electoral Reforms when the RA 7941 was passed in 1995, making him extremely determined to safeguard the law by amending it. 

Ejercito shared Sotto’s frustrations, stressing that even contractors or groups doing business with the government have hijacked the party-list system by posing as marginalized, denying the legitimate groups like labor, agriculture, youth, and cooperatives, among others, of their rightful chance at representation.

"Now, as long as you have advocacy [or] you share the same goals and vision, you can represent a party-list. I think this is what we have to look into,” Ejercito, one of the bill’s proponents, told the panel partly in Filipino.

“This backdoor has already been exploited, and apparently, many contractors, which I think is more than 50 percent, have already gained entry,” he added. 

Panel chair Risa Hontiveros also believed that it’s high time to revisit the mechanics of the party-list system, including the two percent threshold, seat cap, and the method of allocating the mandated 20 percent of the overall seats in the House to party-list representatives. 

Under the law, only party-lists securing at least 2 percent of the total vote share are entitled to one seat in the House. But other groups that didn’t reach the threshold may still be awarded seats to comprise the 20 percent quota reserved for partylists. The remaining 80 percent will come from congressional districts.

 A winning party-list could also get another seat if it gets another two percent, capped at three seats.

“These are structural issues; they affect not only party-list groups but the composition of the House itself,” Hontiveros stressed. “We need to give the marginalized, always, an opportunity to participate in politics, while strengthening proportional representation based on genuine ideologies and advocacies.”

Lift 3-seats cap

Meanwhile, former partylist lawmaker Etta Rosales proposed to lift the maximum three-seats cap, arguing that party-lists with increasingly higher numbers of votes must get the full number of seats they deserve.

“If you can get more votes to get more seats in parliament, why limit it to only three seats? That, to me, was a very bad provision in the party-list law,” she contended. 

Commission on Elections Commissioner George Garcia backed the passage of the bill with the hope of finally addressing the longstanding problem of substitution. 

He cited a provision in the party-list law, which allows substitution even after the election in case of death, disqualifdacaion or withdrawal of the nominee, as one legal loophole that has been exploited through the years. 

The scheme, he explained, prompted the poll body to require party-lists to submit a maximum of 10 nominees and barred substitution in case of withdrawal, despite concerns of legality.

“For example, when a party-list wins one seat, all five [nominees] resign, all the urban poor resign, then they will submit a new list this time, they are no longer urban poor,” Garcia told senators.

“That is the culprit, Madam chair, when replacements are allowed, especially after the election,” he added. 

Aside from the issue of substitution, Garcia stressed the need to pass the bill to address ambiguities in Supreme Court interpretations regarding party-list representations and the computation of seat allocations.