Deputized by the Comelec

It wasn’t the voice of love calling to me…  It was a chance to temporarily change my daily housewifely routine.  So I bragged to the husband that I was going to have a job. The job (or the deputized volunteer work) turned out to be far from being a lark.

There was the three-day training-seminar by Comelec representatives in February.  Attention was in high gear as I made heads and tails of the thick handouts? laws, instructions, flow charts, forms, and a myriad of acronyms? SBRCG, OAV, CLOAV, SBEI, etcetera.  (The Special Board of Election Inspectors or SBEI for voting or counting was where I was to serve.)  Thanks to modern technology, I ended up with a copy of the PowerPoint presentation in my USB (another acronym!) for review at home.

Overseas absentee voting is different in scale and ambience though not in spirit.  Voting at home takes a day; overseas it takes a month.  Public schools are our polling places; overseas these are the Philippine embassies, consulates, labor and welfare offices and the like recognized by the host country as part of Philippine territory.

There were more than 18 thousand registered Filipino voters in Dubai and the UAE’s northern emirates.  Assigned as a substitute poll clerk and canvassing chair, I ended up solely as a poll clerk when the original one begged off.

Voting opened daily from 12:00 noon to 8:00 pm, at the consulate’s carport beside a fence that was as hot as a brick oven.  Summer is nigh in this desert city.  If 32 degrees back home is sweltering, think 44 degrees and a smattering of dust storm, beautiful to behold as long as one watches through a sealed window.

Too embarrassed to back out despite a splitting headache, I hung on tooth and nail, even if it meant becoming a sun-blest shrunken raisin.  To our relief, we were later transferred to the air-conditioned main building.

As happens with beginnings and endings, the former was exciting and the latter was a relief.  The month-long period had us wish for a tsunami of voters.  They came in trickles.  On the average, five a day was an accomplishment.  To get the twenties was a victory.  We took to ribbing each other over whose SBEI got a zero on a given day.

The turnout was eight percent, but it was real, serious business.  It seemed every folded ballot in an envelope was a sacred relic.  Most of us were first-timers who all wanted to do right and well; we didn’t wish to be accused of anything and we took the threat of a six-month jail term seriously.

Some voters were scathing; I chose to keep mum though it would have been sweet as a tender sigh to bite their ears off.  ( ‘Are you sure my vote will be counted?’  ‘So-and-so a candidate?  Crazy!’ ‘How much are you getting for this?’)  There was palpable cynicism, but hey, elections or candidates aren’t the fault of poll helpers like me.  (You won’t see me again and I won’t recognize you anyway, went my unsaid answer.)

By May 14, voting opened at 3:00 a.m., timed with the 7:00 a.m. opening back home.  Some media representatives, including a TV crew with camera focused at the gate, were there to catch that one voter who may come in the dark of dawn.  It was almost light when the first one came, at 5:00 a.m.  We were to learn later that a consulate staffer quietly cast his vote at 3:00 a.m.
There were no weekend breaks.  I felt the strain as my laundry piled up, our floor gathered dust, the plants were overlooked, and the cat was noisier.  Sighs very often lie, but it dawned on me that I missed my housewifely routine.

Shall I do it again?  Certainly.  I’ve come to appreciate the Comelec as an institution that does its utmost to ensure electoral efficiency and truthfulness, until characters in high places harass it.  And I’m now one in spirit with all those teachers in my country who suffer more and even risk their lives.

I feel good that I’ve experienced elections in all angles, as a voter, news reporter, and now as poll clerk, I told the husband who went sleepless for 48 hours chairing the canvassing.  There’s one more you haven’t experienced, he said with a glint in his eyes.  Er, no, I won’t aspire for candidacy.  I’m no Victor Wood with his voice of love.

(20 May 2007)