Election lawyer slams another BSKE reset
An election lawyer on Monday wrote Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian, urging him to help ensure the holding of the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections (BSKE) this November, amid efforts to reset anew this often-postponed democratic exercise.
The postponement of the barangay and SK polls has been favored particularly by other locally elected officials—as a random check would show the many legislative measures filed through the decades seeking to postpone these elections.
Last month, more than 60 congressmen filed a bill seeking in effect to postpone the Nov. 2 polls by extending the terms of incumbent barangay and SK officials to another year, while Sen. Francis Escudero filed a similar measure in the upper chamber.
Barangay and SK officials are supposed to serve three years, but this fixed term was disrupted by laws passed by Congress which led to the repeated postponement of the elections since 2022.
‘Right to suffrage’
The exercise this year was itself rescheduled from December 2025, as election lawyer Romulo Macalintal noted in his three-page letter to Gatchalian.
Macalintal said barangay officials elected in October 2023 were supposed to end their terms by December 2025.
“This contract was breached when [Congress passed] Republic Act No. 12232 postpon[ing] the December 2025 BSKE to November 2026,” he said.
“And here again, the proposed bill [filed by Escudero] would like to breach this constitutional contract once more by postponing the November 2026 elections to November 2028,” he added.
Macalintal argued that Escudero’s measure is a “transparent semantic maneuver” and “a clear violation of the people’s right of suffrage.”
He asked Gatchalian to allow him and other concerned citizens and stakeholders to appear before the Senate plenary or its relevant committees, so they could present their stand on opposing yet another postponement of the barangay and SK polls.
‘Firm opposition’
The National Movement for Free Elections has also expressed its “firm opposition” to the postponement of the polls, while Commission on Elections Chair George Erwin Garcia had said the elections should proceed as scheduled but added this was a “political” matter left to Congress.
Senate President Pro Tempore Vicente Sotto III, a former vice mayor of Quezon City, has also expressed his reservations about postponing the elections.
Gatchalian, a former congressman and mayor of Valenzuela City, said earlier the Senate would decide on the proposed measures this week. —WITH A REPORT FROM PNA
