Home > Op-ed > PATHLESS TRAVELS > May 23, 2004 | To bottom

Whirlwind election watch – whew!

It was a whirlwind project that took our breaths away. Not to mention 48 sleepless hours.

“Whirlwind” is the only word I can think of to describe the Election Watch Media Center, a non-partisan election watchdog project based in Baguio-Benguet but which also tried to cover other election-related events in the other Cordillera, Ilocos, and Cagayan Valley provinces.

The EWMC was, at its very incipient stages, a pet project of local print media people in Baguio who banded together under the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) flag. At first, we had wanted to offer our media skills in reviving the more comprehensive People’s Watch formation. People’s Watch had done an excellent job of serving as electoral watchdog in Baguio during the 2001 elections.

But several factors – extreme constraints in our available time and resources, for example – obliged us to aim for a more modest Media Center. The idea was for the EWMC to link up with other electoral watchdogs such as the NAMFREL, the PPCRV, the pollwatch machineries of the various candidates and parties; to gather and cross-check all sorts of election-related reports from a wide range of sources; and to make these reports promptly accessible to the local as well as national media.

The big media outfits were getting ready with their own election-day reportage, but we figured that our own efforts to gather and sift through various field reports, and to help media colleagues spot the trends as these emerge, would be of distinct value.

We only had two weeks to set up everything. Luckily, in the meantime, two other groups had also initiated their own non-partisan election watch efforts.

One was the Teachers’ Hotline of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Metro Baguio chapter headed by Dr. Erlinda Palaganas of UP Baguio. Painfully aware of the teachers’ perennial problems as frontline Comelec personnel at the precinct and municipal-canvass levels, the ACT Teachers’ Hotline offered about a dozen cellphone numbers and a Quick-Reaction Team. The idea was to promptly receive and respond to all sorts of teachers’ problems at the precincts – from food, to electoral irregularities, to outright violence.

Another was the Youth Action Network, a joint effort of the Baguio-Benguet chapters of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP), the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), and the Student Christian Movement of the Philippines (SCMP). It was vacation time for most student-youth, but a number of Baguio students, including some seminarians and broadcast media interns, offered to serve as votewatch volunteers.

The ball started rolling from thereon.

###

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank again UP Baguio Chancellor Priscillia Supnet-Macansantos for allowing us the use of UP Baguio’s Multi-Purpose Hall and phone/Internet facilities as the EWMC’s base of operations from May 8 to the early morning of May 11.

In like manner, we would like to thank Dr. Helen Tibaldo and Nathan Alcantara of the Philippine Information Agency – CAR, for also offering local PIA facilities in our effort to quickly disseminate the EWMC’s election bulletins. Fr. Andres Cosalan of the Baguio-Benguet Vicariate also graciously offered us to make use of their facilities at the SAC-Bishop’s Residence, but we could not take advantage of his offer since we already had our hands full at the UP Baguio base and with our roving teams.

Our application for media accreditation was finally approved by Regional Director Armand Velasco of Comelec – CAR two days before Election Day. Despite the irritating delays, we should remain thankful the Comelec director spared the few moments needed to sign the Comelec-issued ID cards we had long waited for.

The space in this column is too short for me to list all the other contributors and the 50-plus volunteers who gave various kinds of support to the EWMC – from cooked meals, snacks, endless pots of brewed coffee, to roving-team vehicles, cellphones, and prepaid cell cards.

“If you build it, they will come.” Thus went a now-famous line from a film about baseball nostalgia and the power of miracles. When the EWMC was first conceptualized, we knew we could get more volunteers and resources than we could handle. But I was still amazed at the extent of non-partisan, unpaid voluntarism that we were able to mobilize, given the short period.

Many other volunteers were trooping to the headquarters of some big parties who could offer big daily allowances for pollwatchers. Just the same, I’m very certain the EWMC could have mobilized even up to 100 volunteers, some of them outside Baguio-Benguet, had we prepared at least a month earlier.

###

Many lessons and insights can be gained from our EWMC experience, and from the experience of the May 10 elections in general.

For now, I will just dwell on one point: Gone are the days when our people would rely on just one or two nationwide election watchdogs such as NAMFREL and PPCRV. NAMFREL’s methodologies and seeming non-transparency especially in its quick count for the presidential and vice-presidential votes are now being placed under scrutiny by critics. In any case, the country needs more decentralized election watchdogs at the city or municipal, provincial, and regional levels.

Local initiatives such as the EWMC, Teachers’ Hotline, and YAN should ultimately grow into such localized watchdogs. They can form networks and alliances to facilitate the gathering, exchange, and centralization of ER/CoC data, without sacrificing their independence. They could remain non-partisan in a partisan way, if you know what I mean. The PATRIOTS initiative at the national level is also providing a refreshing counterpoint to the drone of Comelec and NAMFREL that “Gloria’s in her heaven and everything’s alright with the world,” and that “fraud and violence are only isolated cases.”

Personally, I don’t harbor illusions about the capacity of Philippine elections to produce a stable government “of the people and from the people” in the real sense, under the present political setup. But at least the electoral process can provide our people with some educational experience in politics and political struggle.

Choosing and supporting the right candidates or the right party-list groups is one way to maximize participation and potential gains in the elections.

Pursuing the ideal of clean and honest elections, completely free of fraud and violence, is another way. Electoral parties and candidates of all stripes – except those who rely on fraud and violence to stay in power – should find our initiatives worthy of support. Especially now that the NAMFREL bigshots seem to be content with “relatively clean and honest elections,” where massive nationwide fraud and violence might be claimed but cannot be proven. #