The latest news as I was writing this is that the Commission on Elections extended the voting period until 8pm tonight. This should just be enough time to accommodate late-comers to practice their right to vote. There are also reports of defective precinct count optical scan machines or what people here would like to call in short as “Pi-Kos”.
But one hellish nightmare experienced by many of those who went to polling precincts as early as 7am would have to be the lack of coordination and systematic logistics from the many election volunteers stationed and the epic failure that are the “clustered precincts”.
As a first-time voter, I was expecting that people would find it hard adjusting to the modernized system of voting but turns out it’s the system of “clustered precincts” that had people scratch their heads.
The public school right next door to our house serves as a precinct for about thousands of voting residents in our barangay. Voters are assigned to different sections to better manage the number of voters coming in at one time. But with the clustered system, the more than 20 sections where merged into five groups, each assigned to vote in a particular voting area found within the school. A “numbering system” was used to helped organize the voters.
Most of what I said in the last paragraph weren’t exactly made known to many until today. Imagine the chaos starting from 7am where confusion and heated arguments were filling up the halls as people don’t know where they are supposed to go. Here’s the major problems I found while inside the school:
1. The list of voters were posted in the school hallways instead of outside for incoming voters to see and make sure that their names are in the list.
2. Senior citizens weren’t aware that they will be provided with an “express lane”
3. They were too much election volunteers in the area at one time ma, many of them wearing red and weren’t doing anything but sit around and smoking inside flammable classrooms.
4. The volunteers apparently are making problems for themselves and the voters by their lack of clear coordination and communications.
5. The volunteers are also trying to vote as well but they should have done so at a later time as courtesy for the other voters (because they DID signed up to monitor the elections and not do nothing)
6. Voter confusion stemmed from having people sent to “boarding areas” where they are supposed to be given a piece of paper containing numbers and wait til they are called according to their assigned numbers. Unfortunately in one boarding area, volunteers just let a throng of people to come inside in large numbers only to end up being crowded in a not so spacious room while the volunteer assigned to us kept on moving around passing out numbers instead of staying one place like the door entrance and have those numbers distributed to people at the point of entry. Imagine I was voter 111 out of 200 people in one voting area alone as of 11am (By the way I’m in 14a).
As for the optical scan machines, the school was given 5 units. One unit had a short-term technical problem because a voter kinda touched a button of the machine. Good thing there was enough tech support to sort things out fast.
The voting process became a lot faster when the school eventually ditched the numbering system and just had us simply line-up until we reached the voting area. Lucky I was able to see my name on the voter’s list with my mom since we were asked which number (by order of our surnames) we were assigned to. I was later given a ballot and an election secrecy folder. I sat on a chair near the windows so I could feel the wind coming in and get enough light for me to read the names of my chosen candidates.
Out of the oh-so-many-names I have to choose from to fill in as my choices for various government positions, I only chose 7 names: one for President, another for vice-president, 2 for senators, 1 for Valenzuela City mayor, 1 for vice-mayor, and 1 for Congressional District 1 Representative. I abstained from voting anyone running for the city council due to a lack of awareness of who they are to me as a citizen of the city, and from voting one out of 187 party-list groups vying a seat in Congress because they’re just too many of them.
I never understood of the whole party-list system especially on the notion of how exactly do they represent members of the marginalized/underrepresented sectors. And think about it: 187 party-list groups vying for 57 seats with their names filed under “Party-List” occupying more than two-thirds of one side of the ballot alone.
The actual voting process with my ballot being swallowed by the optical scan machine took only a mere 5 minutes, a pint out of the 4.5 hours I have to endure while waiting for my turn just to vote. Fortunately we are here in Arko that the PCOS machine didn’t cause any chaos among the populace but it was merely the lack of coordination coming from the election volunteers as I’ve mentioned earlier.
Now as voting period is at its final few hours until the 20th hour, the only thing that the nation has to wait now is the counting of ballots which should be a lot quicker now. The election commission expects the final results to be out by one week instead of 1 and a half months peple had to wait when we were still doing manual counting.
I just hope that everything will go smoothly.
GO PHILIPPINES!
