Many Negros teachers still unpaid for Election Day service, says poll official

BACOLOD CITY, Negros Occidental, Philippines – Many of the 6,132 teachers, and 99 members and 330 support staff of 33 boards of canvassers in this province have yet to be paid their election service honoraria totalling P27.168 million, the province’s elections supervisor Wil Arceño said on Monday.

Arceño said some teachers who had automated teller machine (ATM) accounts have been paid P4,000 each.

On the other hand, teachers without ATM accounts have not been paid and their names have been sent to Manila so they could be paid through a manual payroll system, he said.

Members of the boards of canvassers should be getting P10,000 each while the BoC support staff would be paid P5,000 each, Arceño said.

So far, the Commission on Elections here has paid for the services of the 857 Precinct Count Optical Scan technicians who got P4,000 each and P1,000 each for cellular phone loads as well as the 33 teachers who served in the random manual audits who got P3,500 each, Arceño said.

The random manual audit of returns in one precinct per district in Negros Occidental and in the lone district of Bacolod were conducted after the May 13 polls to determine the accuracy of the PCOS machines, he said.

Arceño said that of the seven random counts, variances in the vote tally were noted in five voting centers.

He added that he did not have the figures on the results and ballot boxes because these were sent directly to Manila.

The five ballot boxes came from Bacolod City, Cadiz City in the second district, San Enrique in the fourth district, La Castellana in the fifth district and Cauayan in the sixth district, he said.