Not enough teachers for poll duties

THE lack of public school teachers in Cebu will prompt the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to hire over 14,000 people from the private sector to fill up the vacant slots in the Board of Election Tellers (BET) during the October 28 barangay elections.

Data from the Comelec provincial office shows that 22,797 teachers are needed to man the 7,599 clustered precincts in the province. In Cebu City, 4,671 teachers are needed to serve as BETs in 1,557 precincts. But Cipriano Balili, education program supervisor in charge of election matters at the Department of Education in Cebu City, said that they only have 3,000 public school teachers available for election duty in the city.

In Cebu province, only about 10,000 teachers are in the list of possible BETs, said DepEd Cebu provincial superintendent Arden Monisit. This leaves about 14,468 BET posts that needs to be filled.

There are more clustered precincts in this month’s polls which will be done manually.

Last May, with the use of the Precinct Count Optical Scanner, voting precincts had a maximum of 1,000 voters but for the barangay elections, the Comelec limited it to 400 voters.