Such imagery, grossly oversimplified, is distressing. It is a caricature vulnerable to condemnation. How, indeed, may we maintain our democratic pretenses if votes are dictated upon by jaded powerbrokers?
But the reality behind that evocative term is much more complex. It requires a bit more sophistication to understand  and, more important, to manage.
The notion of command votes was reintroduced into the current political discourse by pro-administration spokesmen hard pressed to explain how they could produce a landslide win in the face of surveys showing a split vote. They pulled out of the hat a concept that was an accurate tool in explaining our electoral dynamics four decades ago.
Four decades ago, we had a very different society. Our population was largely rural and the economy was principally agricultural.
In those conditions, there were large networks of dependence and allegiance centered on the plantation economy. Hacenderos basically instructed communities under their economic control how they should vote.
This was the locale within which we could speak of command votes. And so it was that Filipino election during this time seemed to be an eternal struggle between the "sugar bloc" and the "tobacco bloc"  the two major sections of our traditional plantation economy that have most significantly declined. This was the basic rivalry that underpinned the old two-party system.
Today, we are looking at a very different society. The vast majority of voters live in highly urbanized areas. Agriculture accounts for a very small portion of our national economy.
The antonym of command vote, in the parlance of electoral analysts and operators, is market vote. The latter is accurately descriptive of a freely transacting mass of voters responding, much like the modern consumer, to media stimulus in making their electoral decisions. It is the market vote, with all the quirks and superstitions that bedevil the popular imagination, that accounts for the politics of name recall that installed movie stars, sports idols and media celebrities in elective posts.
The present shift in campaign spending from dole-outs to local power brokers to television ads reflects the predominance of market votes. Much like trying to sell a particular brand of toothpaste to a mass of analytical consumers, campaign managers are now trying to market electoral commodities packaged to suit the prevailing tastes of a freely deciding electorate.
SWS recently tested the size of the market vote by asking respondents if they would decide on their own on election day. 80% of them said they would. That was the headline both SWS and much of the media adopted.
I think that was the wrong headline. The correct headline should have been that a hefty 20% of our voters rely on someone else to make their electoral decisions for them.
Respondents normally choose the "correct" answer to a poll question. That is the answer that is normatively positive according to the moral fashion of the day.
In the case of the SWS question, the "correct" answer is to say that you make your own decisions at the polling precinct. That is the premise of the pervasive democratic orthodoxy.
The fact that a fifth of respondents chose not to give the "correct" answer is telling. It supports the claim that command votes still matter. That should have been the headline.
Considering how the senatorial candidates are clustered, a mere 5% command vote can dramatically alter the names in the winning column. As a rule of thumb among electoral operators, 5% is the volume of votes that could be turned through effective election day operations (principally the distribution of sample ballot containing the senatorial candidates endorsed by local political brokers).
Remember that in 9 out of 10 local races, there is either only the administration-endorsed candidate or a rivalry between two pro-administration politicians. The administration senatorial slate enjoys overwhelming advantage in sample ballot operations.
I am not sure if "command vote" is still the most accurate terminology to describe the greater likelihood that voters will respect the senatorial endorsements of a Hagedorn or a Duterte.
The term "command vote" best applies to the phenomenon of INC members casting a vote according to the wishes of their superiors. Inclusion in the INC sample ballot is most prized by candidates even as exit polls show a compliance rate that is remarkably lower than what urban legend holds true.
The bloc voting associated with INC members is the model that other religious leaders are trying to emulate. Mike Velarde’s El Shaddai and Eddie Villanueva’s Jesus is Lord have endorsed candidates in the past and will likely do so this time around. Previous exit polls show such endorsements to have very little value, however. The most telling exit poll is the one in 2004 that correlated admitted membership in JIL with casting a vote for Villanueva. The correlation was embarrassingly low, explaining why Villanueva received less votes than his vain estimate of his clout in delivering command votes.
That vain estimate encouraged Villanueva to contest the 2004 presidential elections. The same vain estimate underpins Velarde’s repeated threats to run for president in 2010.
Notwithstanding the findings of previous exit polls, politicians are still willing to do funny things on the stage with Velarde. It is akin to performing rites of penance just in case heaven and hell do exist.