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than twenty five thousand dollars; and
c) resident in the Republic ten years prior to his election,
provided that the President and the Vice President shall not
come from the same County.” Lib. Const. Art. 52 (1986).
By the same token, the fact that a person is selected to seek a certain
office at a particular time cannot be interpreted to mean, as the appellee
impresses upon this Court, that the person has all along been desirous of
seeking the public office to which he or she has been selected to contest. It is
true that in some instances, the person may out rightly express the desire to
contest for the office or the desire may be inferred from the fact that the
person failed to rebut or reject political advocacies being made in his or her
name by “friends” for a particular elective office. But the mere fact that a
person is nominated at a particular time to seek an elective public office
cannot be a basis for the National Elections Commission interpretation that
the person may have harbored or desired the intention to seek such office
two or three years prior to the event.
We do not believe that the Legislature intended to subscribe either of
such intentions or desire to the law. We do not herein concern ourselves with
the wisdom of the Act. Indeed, as we clearly stated in the Polson-Mappy case
we are not clothed with the authority to determine whether the Legislature
acted wisely or not in passing the Act. What we determined was that the Act
is constitutional and that it barred certain members of the Executive Branch
named in the Constitution and holding presidential appointments from
engaging in political activities and contesting elective public offices while still
retaining those positions. We do not believe that the use of the word desire
detracted from that legislative intent. As the Polson Opinion stated, the
wording of the sections, given the intent of the Act, suffered from a language
deficit. But that defect in the language of the sections does not, in and of
itself, alter the intent of the framers of the law who passed the Act and
whose intent was manifest both within the Chambers of the Legislature and
over and within the public media, even if the intent is considered, as stated
by the appellants, to be absurd. Thus, as much as views may differ as to the
wisdom of the specific sections, and their implications for the nation, we
believe that the intention of the section was as concluded by the Chairman of