Teachers' group to Comelec: Start election training now

A national advocacy group for teachers has called on the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to start training teachers for automated election duty this month and not wait for February when they will be busy with school tasks. In a statement, the Teachers' Dignity Coalition (TDC), formed in Manila in 2006, also demanded optional election duty for teachers. The group noted that the Comelec’s first task should be to identify who among the more than 500,000 teachers are qualified to sit on the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) in the upcoming polls. Then their training in the complex operations of automated elections should begin as soon as possible. The BEIs are the government personnel in each polling precinct tasked with assisting voters and counting the votes at the precinct level. The BEIs are traditionally public school teachers. The Comelec had earlier announced that it would be training some 245,000 teachers to participate in this year’s automated elections, the first one in the country on a national scale. “By February, we will be busy with school tasks -- review for achievement tests, accomplishment of forms, year-end activities. We may not have time for training because the school obligations are our priority," said TDC president Benjo Basas in a statement released Sunday. According to the General Instructions for automated elections recently released by the Comelec, teachers serving on the BEIs will have an array of new tasks associated with election duty. These include distributing and explaining long, multiple-choice ballots to voters and operating the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines. This will be the first time that voters will be filling out multiple-choice ballots and delays are expected as many voters may take longer than usual figuring out what to do, creating possible choke points on election day, May 10, 2010. An October survey by Pulse Asia showed that six of 10 Filipinos have very little or no knowledge about the computerized poll system. Voter education In its statement, the TDC faulted the Comelec for neglecting to educate voters on the complexity of the automated election process, making it potentially more difficult for teachers with election duty. The TDC also cited the Sexbomb Girls' music video, “May Bilog na Hugis Itlog," as a successful voter education project, "familiarizing voters with this high-tech system," said Basas, the TDC president. The song was sponsored by GMA Network and has been airing on both television and radio as a public service. — KBK/HGS/NPA, GMANews.TV