Teachers threaten poll duty boycott

Member of the Teachers’ Dignity Coalition (TDC) warned on Sunday that they would not perform poll duties in the May 10 elections if the Commission on Elections (Comelec) failed to address their most urgent concern—their right to vote.

“We urge the Comelec to tackle and immediately resolve this matter. If not, we may opt to call on our colleagues to refuse the poll assignments,” TDC National Chairman Benjo Basas said during an interview.

Basas added that they welcome the new 30-minute time frame for the members of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) to vote in the polls based on general instructions issued by the Comelec on December 29.

“The 10-minute extension to facilitate our voting would be useless if in the first place, teachers could not be allowed to participate as BEI or even as voters,” he said.

In the past, teachers who were on poll duty were given only 20 minutes to cast their votes during elections.

Members of the BEI, according to the new Comelec rules, can vote in the precincts where they are registered “provided that they do so when the voting in their respective places of assignments is light, and their absence shall not be for more than 30 minutes.”

With the automation of the May 10 polls, the number of teachers that would be deployed for duty was reduced to 250,000 from about 800,000.

Delisted as voters

Basas argued that about 80 percent of teachers are not qualified to sit as members of the BEI because they were delisted from the voters’ list for “failure to vote” in the past elections.

“All of them were disallowed to sit as members of the BEI. Worse, all of them could not vote,” he said.

“We just hope that this is not a part of the rumoured grand design to derail the coming polls. We teachers are just doing our task under the law, we would not want to be used or victimized by bad politics.”

Election laws automatically deactivate a voter who fails to cast his or her vote in two consecutive national elections.

Several Comelec resolutions in the past allowed teachers to cast their votes in the precincts where they are assigned and even allotted three excess ballots specifically for the use of BEI members.

“All teachers who served in the past elections also cast their votes in the precincts where they were assigned as members of Board of Election Inspectors. The problem was, those votes were not reflected in the book of voters, but it’s not our fault, it’s the Comelec’s responsibility to record our votes,” Basas said.

He added that their office has been receiving complaints from the field especially in Metro Manila, where in most cases the registration of teachers has been deactivated.

“In the 2007 local and national elections, the Comelec allowed and actually compelled all the teachers, regardless of their registration, to serve as members of the BEI and were allowed to vote. Now, the Comelec seems to be strictly implementing the law, perhaps because they do not need many teachers as they did in the past elections.” Basas said.

“We have consistently appealed to the Comelec and had several dialogues with their officials.

Unfortunately, the poll body failed to respond to this very urgent matter,” he added. –JAMES KONSTANTIN GALVEZ Reporter, Manila Times