Thoughts about Vote Buying in the Philippines

Vote-buying in the Philippines can be understood as an instance of the classical prisoner's dilemma problem.On the assumption that a certain class of voters vote for the candidate who gives them money, then:Let's say you have two candidates, A and B. The strategy of candidate A while taking into consideration the assumption about voter behavior would follow this train of thought:

1. If Candidate B does not give out money to voters, then it will be better for me to give money to voters because this would increase my chances of winning their votes.

2. If Candidate B does give out money to voters, then it will be better for me to give out money too, in that way, candidate B won't have a definite edge over me. ( Note that this is a simplistic assumption because one could argue that the amount of money given by a candidate also matters in swaying a voter's decision. )

3. Regardless of whether candidate B gives out money or not, it is in A's best interest to give out money, because either way, this strategy would increase his chances of winning a voter's vote.

And candidate B would actually goes through the same analysis.

My observation with vote buying in certain towns in Samar showed that this kind of strategy actually works. Perhaps the assumption about voter behaviour used in this analysis is true. For the 2nd case, the one who wins is the one who gives out more money. So for this case, an 'auction' model becomes the appropriate model to describe vote-buying in most towns.

This analysis provides two classes of solutions (voter-centric or candidate-centric) that can be used in addressing this issue. The first one is a class of strategies that aims to change voter behaviour so that receiving money from the candidates won't affect their decisions on whom to vote. The second set of options follows a strategy whose theme is to make candidates be more honest in their methods.

Logistics wise, I'd personally select the second option because you only have to deal with relatively fewer people (towns in provinces) i.e.  100s candidates as compare to thousands of voters that you will have to re-educate and whatnot. This is a more viable solution, as compare to voter's education program currently used by COMELEC. If COMELEC really wants to curb vote buying, they should focus their resources on solving on the side of the candidates. Possible approaches are:

1) maybe thrrough the use of marked money. 

2) maglagay ng surveillance sa mga kandidato at mga tauhan nito especially a day before the election.
3) through candidate education, baka naman makonsensya sila hindi na mamimgay.

Does this make any sense?