256 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition continue to frustrate the goal of free and fair elections. For instance, the routine processes of registration, actual voting, the counting and canvassing of votes have always been mired in rampant practices of fraud, manipulation, and at times the use of outright force and coercion. The attempts by the Comelec since the 2010 elections to address these recurring problems through an automation system has in fact brought about a transparency crisis in the entire electoral process. In his chapter, Azurin systematically explains the roots and dynamics of this costly electoral experiment and the impunity in the treatment of erring ranking ofcials in the Comelec and the foreign vendor and implementor (Smartmatic) of the failed automation system. Outside of the usual problems about electoral mechanisms, there is one critical component of vertical accountability that deserves a fuller study and this concerns the problem of political representation as seen in our poorly institutionalized party system. Our electoral system lacks the tradition of strong parties committed to clear platforms of government and this has led to voting behavior patterns that have little impact on the accountability of elected public ofcials. In truth, candidates for public ofce rely mainly on family networks and alliances driven by narrow and opportunistic interests. Thus the function of “aggregating, mediating, and arbitrating interests and conicts” normally undertaken by well-institutionalized parties in working democracies is supplanted by alliances of powerful families with parochial interests or by a willful president little restrained by accountability mechanisms. The 1987 Constitution sought to energize the party system by including a Party List provision that allotted 20 percent of the total seats in the House of Representatives for candidates elected under this system. In its initial implementation, the party list law was seen as a tool of social justice for parties representing the “marginalized and underrepresented sectors in society”. However, as Tuazon documents in his chapter, the party list has increasingly come to be dominated by powerful political families and dummies of established political groups, negating the original spirit of the law. This “bastardization of the party list” as Tuazon refers to it was made possible by two major factors. First, the Comelec showed indecisiveness and inconsistencies in identifying who qualies as legitimate representatives of the marginalized sectors. Second, the Supreme Court in a series of rulings diluted the original intent of the constitutional provision to have the party list serve as a vehicle for representation by the underrepresented sectors and thus allowed virtually any party to run under it. Reforms to strengthen the party system remains a key area for enhancing vertical accountability mechanisms. The Party List Law needs to be amended to ensure that it serves primarily as a tool of political representation for the marginalized sectors of society and to follow more strictly the principle of proportional representation in its allocation of seats (such as doing away with the three-seat cap for winning parties). Moreover, added reforms can be in the