Comelec chief favors late training of BEIs

The late training of public school teachers who will sit as board of election inspectors (BEIs) in the May elections will actually benefit them, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said on Monday. “Para fresh pa sa kanilang mind ang tinuro sa kanila (So that the things that they will learn from the training will still be fresh in their minds)," said Comelec chairman Jose Melo in an interview with reporters. Melo said the training would start on March, the end of school year 2009-2010, virtually ignoring the call of a group of teachers who wants the training to be held as early as this month. The group, the Teachers' Dignity Coalition (TDC), said the Comelec’s first task should be to identify who among the more than 500,000 teachers are qualified to sit on the BEI in the upcoming polls. But Melo said an early training could be disadvantageous as the teachers may forget what they have just learned when election day comes. “Sa akin nga nagyayari yun eh (That happens even to me)," he said. The Comelec had earlier said it is planning to tap around 245,000 teachers to sit as BEIs in the May polls, with each clustered precinct having at least three BEIs. BEIs are the government personnel in each polling precinct who assist voters and count the votes at the precinct level. They are traditionally public school teachers. Melo expressed confidence that that they would be able to train all the BEIs that would be needed in the May polls despite their huge number. “We will be able to reach the great, great bulk of the teachers," he said. Teachers serving on the BEIs will have an array of new tasks associated with election duty, including distributing and explaining long, multiple-choice ballots to voters and operating the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines. Poll machine supplier Smartmatic spokesman Gene Gregorio had said that training an individual to operate a PCOS unit would just take about two hours or so. He added that they will be deploying around 48,000 technical support crew to oversee the utilization of the poll machines, with one technician for every two precincts. The training for these technicians, on the other hand, will start on January 7 and will last for two weeks, he said. - KBK, GMANews.TV