Poll official on voter ed: Much remains to be done
For an official of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), much remains to be done when it comes to voter education.
James Jimenez of the Comelec Education and Information Department noted how some Filipino voters still remain uncertain on how to properly cast their votes based on the ongoing Random Manual Audit (RMA) of the May 2022 polls.
"We still have people making dots in the very center of the oval they need to fill in completely; we have people leaving the ovals blank and instead encircling them; we also have people underlining the names of the candidates they want to vote for, and more. This, despite clear instructions on the ballot itself," he said in a statement.
"The voters either didn’t know the proper way of filling up the ballot or simply didn’t care enough about voting properly that they were okay to do a piss-poor job of it," added Jimenez.
"Either way, for these people, at least, voter education clearly fell short of either of both of its twin goals, to teach people the proper way of filling out the ballot and teaching them the value of the vote," he said.
Jimenez said it has been uncomfortable being constantly reminded by the ongoing audit that much remains to be done in terms of voter education.
"That despite the efforts at teaching voters from 2010 all the way up to 2019, the end is still nowhere in sight," he said.
But, Jimenez said, it’s not really a surprise especially with the list of electors constantly growing as new voters step up and register.
"There was always going to be a new batch of people who needed instruction on how to shade the ovals," he said.
"The disappointing thing is that we still haven’t reached that critical mass of voters we need to ensure that the knowledge of how to vote properly gets organically passed on to succeeding waves of new voters," added Jimenez.
While conventional voter education does work, he said, there must be a different approach for the hold-out populations – which includes the new voters learning to vote for the first time, the older voters who either still haven’t got it or are still dicking around with their ballots.