Wanted: 18,000+ Vico Sottos

Here is something useful and educational that we could do together: Check out the election results below and beyond the senatorial and partylist races.

- TONYO CRUZ

I'm referring of course to the congressional, provincial, city, municipal and the Muslim Mindanao races.

I've checked the election results in Bulacan. In city after city, municipality after municipality, I saw husbands, wives, children swapped, ran and won for the top posts. Some more durable and more daring than others.

After a fair amount of effort, I've also tried to list down and compare the results in our 82 provinces.

You can check out my Facebook post where I shared what I found.

This column would run out of space if I mentioned every province whose governor, vice mayor, and district representatives belonged to one family.

Surely, you would perhaps arrive at the same observation or conclusion. Still not legally defined, the dynasties are still going strong, and have a firm grip on political power in the provinces.

That's just at the provincial and congressional levels. It would probably take the patience and power of several dozen researchers and a lot more time to drill down to the city and municipal levels.

In many instances, as the tallies would show, the dynasties ran unopposed. In others, the stronger dynasties defeated weaker or weakened dynasties.

While I am as happy as others that some dynastic candidates were defeated, and that good leaders won, these happy incidents appear to be the outliers and the exceptions.