Teachers training starts
Public school teachers who will sit as members of the Board of Election Inspections (BEI) were made to undergo training starting on Friday to teach them the proper use of the Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS) machines and on how to transmit election results.
Lawyer Ferdinand Guijilde, Cebu provincial election officer, said teachers will be evaluated at the end of their training sessions and will be issued a certificate by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
BEIs are expected to receive a P4,000 allowance during the May 13 election.
Guijilde said that 156 PCOS machines arrived in Cebu on Monday for use in the teachers training scheduled from March 8 to 20, but the machines will later be returned to the Comelec Central office for reconfiguration.
“The PCOS were brought here solely for the training of the BEIs,” he said.
Guijilde said they have identified four venues – Stakili Beach Resort in Compostela town in northern Cebu, Villa Teresita Resort in Talisay City in the south, Cordova town in Mactan Island, and in Cebu City – for the conduct of the BEIs training.
Cebu, he said, has a total of 3,169 clustered precincts. Each of the clustered precincts will be assigned one PCOS machine and three teachers to function as BEI.
Lawyer Eddie Abba, Comelec Cebu Province Supervisor, said that in case of poor Internet connection and lost signal especially in the mountains, BEIs have the option to transfer their assigned PCOS machine to the nearest polling center where Internet connectivity is strong to facilitate the transmission of election results to the Comelec server.
But the transfer of the machine will have to be done in the presence of police or military escorts, said Abba.
The BEIs are tasked to collate and count the votes casts at the end of the voting period and print out the Precinct Election Returns (PER). The PCOS will then be connected to a modem by a Smartmatic personnel using the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card for the transmission of the PER to the Comele c municipal or city server./Reporter Vicent Ador Mayor and Correspondent Renan Alangilan
