A senatorial election was held in the Philippines on November 13, 1951. This election was known as a midterm election, and the date when elected candidates took office fells halfway through PresidentElpidio Quirino's four-year term.
Electoral system
Philippine Senate elections are held via plurality block voting with staggered elections, with the country as an at-large district. The Senate has 24 seats, of which 8 seats are up every 2 years. The eight seats up were won by the 1st to 8th placed candidates in 1946; each voter has eight votes and can vote up to eight names, of which the eight candidates with the most votes winning the election.
The election of then senator Fernando Lopez as vice president in 1949 meant that his seat was vacated mid-term. A special election was then held for that seat under first-past-the-post system, for the rest of Lopez's term. This meant there were nine seats up for this election.
Block voting, established in 1941, was abolished in 1951 with Republic Act No. 599. This would later lead to more fragmented results in most national elections.[1]
Summary
As the Hukbalahap rebellion raged in Central Luzon, Filipinos trooped to the polling booths for the 1951 midterm elections—a referendum on President Quirino, who had won the presidency in his own right two years prior. Despite the political remarriage of the two factions of the Liberal Party, the Quirinistas and Avelinistas, the Quirino administration was still far from popular. It had gained notoriety for its inability to rein in corruption and its ineffectual attempts to police lawlessness in the countryside. The Nacionalistas took advantage of the situation and mounted an active campaign to wrest back the Senate from the LP. Led by former President Jose P. Laurel, Quirino’s chief adversary in the 1949 presidential polls, the NP swept all eight Senate seats in contention, the first total victory of the opposition in the Senate. So strong was the rejection of the Quirino administration in 1951 that even LP top honcho, Senate President Mariano Jesus Cuenco, lost his seat. Laurel received the highest number of votes, which was seen as his political rehabilitation and which made him the first and only president, thus far, to have served in the Senate after his presidency.
The seat vacated by Vicente Yap Sotto (Popular Front), who died in 1950, was one of the seats up for election. This also includes the result of the concurrent special election for the seat vacated by Vice President Fernando Lopez in 1949.
