Mandadalumat

By Eryl Cabiles, Managing Editor

Inaction can be a political action. Sometimes, abstention simply means an expression of resistance. It signifies that students are cognizant of the consequences of voting — that when we participate in the electoral process, we legitimize a problematic system that is anti-student. 

We participated in the elections to express our desired refusal, hoping that our “abstain” votes would be recorded in our institutional history, believing that collective abstention would affect the electoral outcome. 

Some students, like me, expressed concern over the Far Eastern University Commission on Elections (FEU COMELEC) proclamation of elected student leaders in the recently concluded University elections last May 7. The election arbiter boasted a 35-percent voter turnout this year, a slight improvement compared to last year’s 24.27 percent. 

However, this official tally was contested by FEU Mathematics Society (MathSoc). In an online statement, they claim that abstentions should not have been included in the overall computation to determine the required 20-percent turnout threshold. 

This analysis revealed that certain candidates have failed to meet the threshold. The FEU 2026 Omnibus Election Code (OEC) instructs that under such circumstances, the COMELEC must declare a failure of elections and is mandated to conduct a “special election” process. 

In the Central Student Organization alone, candidates faced a tug-of-war with abstention, with four of the proclaimed candidates gaining percentage votes below the required margin. Particularly, the candidates for president, vice president, treasurer, and press relations officer have failed to secure the necessary votes to get elected. 

More concerningly, the MathSoc’s reevaluation of the Institute of Arts and Sciences Student Council election tally reveals that all six candidates, while unopposed, failed to meet the threshold. This criticism from MathSoc uncovers the inconsistent application of COMELEC’s OEC in the elections. In their attempt to entice students into participating, they may have desperately sought to legitimize an election that could have been unsuccessful. 

This has also inadvertently debunked the argument that students do not care about politics. If anything, this explains the pattern of dwindling participation for the past three election cycles. We may be reading the data incorrectly, as some student-critics generalized this pattern as “apathy.” 

The sudden rise of voter turnout could be attributed to the procedural change in the elections this year — in this context, it is the inclusion of “abstain” as an option. Because of this option, more students have participated in the elections due to their assumption that they could exercise their political agency better.

In retrospect, when some students urged fellow students to vote, their logic was rooted in the procedural principle of liberal democracy — no vote means failure of democratic responsibility. But to say that this is an individual failure is a pretense of a liberal democratic promise, or worse, a revelation of how the system incentivizes “disciplined” compliance rather than radically confronting the defects of our constructed campus politics. 

It is comical that our “abstain” votes were even used by the COMELEC to legitimize the elections, avoiding a resounding failure of elections, perhaps because they knew that this electoral cycle would never result in anything less than a refusal to maintain the system. So, this inconsistency casts a shadow of doubt on the 35-percent voter turnout. 

Maybe we should have aspired to a failure of elections, not because we do not care about politics, but because shaking the system necessitates a recalibration of the political order. A firm “no” would send a message to the administration that we take our politics seriously because we reject a politics that is rooted in patronage, a bourgeois attitude on governance. 

We already knew what kind of leadership belies the deeper problem of superficial party politics in the University, and we have observed that this kind of student leadership treats politics as a managerial exercise concerned with stability, efficiency, and institutional image. It gives primacy to the mastery of bureaucratic coherence rather than politicizing the campus as a site of contestations. 

Within this logic, governance becomes detached from material inequities that outline student experience because student leaders are rewarded not for politicizing structural issues but for demonstrating administrative competence.

It is in this language of disciplinary power that the “ideal student,” produced and constructed by institutional norms sponsored by the University, becomes one who participates without fundamentally questioning the structures that organize civic participation. 

To become ungovernable, then, is not merely to refuse rules, but to reject the assumption that legitimacy is automatically produced through compliance with institutional procedure. An organized, politicized abstention is a strong indication of active participation — contrary to the general sentiment that students are merely “passive” or disinterested. 

Proclaiming no winners, especially for positions where abstention is obvious, would invite a rerun of the elections. This, if it happens, could open a possibility of reconceptualizing student politics within the University. It is in this lexicon of abstention that we send the loudest voice of resistance to personality politics and shallow student representation. Simply, failure of elections means we take ownership of the result. 

This is why inconveniencing the administration is all the more political. It sends a signal that students think and actively shape their campus experience. Students veer away from what the University has shaped them to be: to be compliant with the procedure, to be mere governable subjects incapable of critical thinking.

On an ordinary day, this could look like a street demonstration — rallying in front of the establishment of power centers, challenging the legitimacy of a government that has failed its citizenry. But inside the University, silence could have been a powerful tool to disrupt pretentious political branding, to create a rupture in a system that trains us to become passive subjects of the administration. 

By rejecting the status quo, this moment can invite both the students and the administration to reconsider other ways of conceptualizing campus politics. Whether it is through a more deliberative democracy or changing how decisions are made in the University, a rupture now could have sparked a discourse on genuine political change. Change not through a rebranding of rehashed proposals, but change imagined as real student empowerment. 

We should refuse and must actively reject a system designed to fail us. Declaring failure of elections by the student body would mean reclaiming the power that is vested within us. Abstention, therefore, is a language that fits the current political landscape — an invitation to start reimagining ways to transform our system into a more radical and emancipatory version of student politics.