248 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition regularly featured “institutionalized seizures of political power by violence: the violence of money, murder, and deceit” as aptly noted by O.D. Corpuz (1989: vol. 2, 575). Indeed, there is wide agreement among various authors about the most intractable problems confronting elections and parties in the Philippines: electoral exercises that have been overwhelmingly dominated by powerful political families (Gutierrez et al. 1992; Rivera 2002, 2015; Simbulan 2005; Tuazon 2007); poor electoral governance as shown by the organizational ineptitude and lack of institutional autonomy of the Commission on Elections (Calimbahin 2010; CenPEG Report 2010); weakly institutionalized, personalistic, and unstable political parties driven mainly by clientelistic rather than programmatic concerns (Montinola 1999; Hutchcroft and Rocamora 2003; Manacsa and Tan 2005; Teehankee 2002; Velasco 2006; Kasuya 2009; Tuazon 2011); the vulnerability of the poor and less educated electorate to rampant vote-buying and coercive pressures by political elites (Schaffer 2007, 2009; Rivera 2013); the increasingly prohibitive costs of election campaigns thus further limiting the pool of candidates to well-endowed families (Balgos and Mangahas 2010); and the costly, misplaced reliance on non-transparent election automation systems since the 2010 elections in the country (The CenPEG Report 2010; Tuazon 2013). In this book, Azurin in his chapter provides a comprehensive examination of the failure of the automated election system in the 2010, 2013, and 2016 elections. Elections are the most visible public mechanism for choosing representatives in a democratic system. As further argued by Diamond, with good elections, “People are more likely to express support for democracy when they see it working to provide genuine political competition, including alternation of power, and when it has at least some effect in controlling corruption, limiting abuse of power, and ensuring rule of law” (cited in Reynolds 2011: 72). However, Schmitter and Karl also rightly alert us to the “fallacy of electoralism” in which elections are considered as a sufcient condition for the existence of democracy (1991: 78). Indeed, while free and fair elections may be necessary conditions for the existence of a democratic system and one form by which public ofcials can be made accountable, it is not clear how this mechanism can be effective especially in democratizing polities. As explained by O'Donnell: Elections …occur only periodically, and their effectiveness at securing vertical account-ability is unclear, especially given the inchoate party systems, high voter and party volatility, poorly dened issues, and sudden policy reversals that prevail in most new polyarchies (1998:113). Seen therefore in a holistic context, our experience of elections and related rules and practices such as guarantees for civil liberties and political rights do