Poll watchdogs all set and ready to go

MANILA, Philippines – Election watchdog groups are as ready as they can ever be for Monday’s polls.

They are opening their monitoring centers, setting up hotlines and tapping the social media networks to receive, relay and process reports of cheating, violence and other election-related incidents from all over the country.

The Commission on Elections has accredited four watchdog groups as official citizens’ arms – Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, One Vote Movement (1-Vote) and the Cotabato City-based Citizens’ Coalition for ARMM Electoral Reforms (Citizens Care).

There are also those watchdogs that have been set up by civil society groups, like the Automated Election System Watch, Kontra Daya, Legal Network for Truthful Elections (Lente), and the Workers’ Electoral Watch (We Watch).

The bigger groups have set up command or operation centers for the elections. PPCRV opened its command center at the Pope Pius XII Institute on United Nations Avenue in Manila last Tuesday.

The PPCRV command center will be fully operational starting Sunday and will remain open until the end of the month. It is equipped with computers and television screens on which electronically transmitted election results will be flashed.

Aside from its voter education and poll-watching duties, PPCRV will also be conducting an unofficial parallel election count, which will be made available online.

The PPCRV hotline during the elections is 52-PPCRV or 527-7278, which will be operational from May 13 to 30, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. PPCRV volunteers will accept calls for free legal advice, vote tallies from the senatorial to mayoral levels, and reporting of election-related observations and queries from the public.

Namfrel will open this Sunday its National Operations Center (NOC) at the main office of the Philippine Institute for Certified Public Accountants on Shaw Boulevard in Mandaluyong City.

Namfrel said it was pursuing six projects for the May 13 polls: voters’ education, voters’ list monitoring, mobile poll-watching, logistics deployment monitoring, random manual audit monitoring and electoral finance monitoring.

“Namfrel will be releasing incident reports throughout election week, as well as other reports based on our findings during the conduct these six projects. [We] will also be releasing reports on the outcome of the count,” it said in a statement.

Most of the watchdogs have Facebook and Twitter accounts which field volunteers will be using for incident reporting. Others have websites to receive election-related reports.

Namfrel’s website (www.namfrel.com.ph) can receive reports of election irregularities, threats, intimidation, violence and mismanagement, subject to verification, while the AES Watch website (www.aeswatch.org) features a location-specific report submission menu and alert system, for 10 categories, from ballot delivery to the random manual audit.

The AES Watch, one of the groups critical of the accuracy and reliability of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines to be used in these elections, will be monitoring the elections from their headquarters at Bahay ng Alumni in the University of the Philippines Diliman campus.

We Watch, set up by Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research, a workers’ nongovernment organization, has joined forces with AES Watch to monitor the elections. Its website (www.we-watch.net) features an “incident map” listing election-related incidents.

The Kontra Daya website (www.kontradaya.org) includes a “monitoring page” which will list four types of election-related incidents—fraud, violence, PCOS problem and military presence/harassment—which are further grouped by region—Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.

Kontra Daya’s hotlines are 0998-1520782, 0998-1520780, 0905-3582478 and 0932-7501548. Reports may also be sent to its e-mail address ([email protected]).

Kontra Daya, composed of militant leftist groups, has set up its command center at the conference room of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP) compound on Edsa in Quezon City.

One Vote, composed of Christian and Protestant groups, also has an election-monitoring system available on its website (www.1-vote.org). Its headquarters are at Gil Preciosa Building on Timog Avenue, Quezon City.

Lente, headquartered at Ateneo Professional Schools campus in Makati City, has set up the Twitter hashtag #ParaSaBayan to receive reports from its volunteers and the public.

Comprising lawyers and law students advocating electoral reforms, Lente has been tapped by the Comelec to help in the implementation of the rules on campaign financing and to assist in drafting complaints and affidavits against candidates or groups that violate campaign finance regulations.