(Click on the Vote 2010 logo on the upper right side of this page and it will bring you to the page.)
Vote 2010 is a partnership among VERA Files, civil society organizations, the community media, individuals and institutions monitoring the May 10, 2010 elections.
Readers will find stories related to the forthcoming May elections that is being held at the time of deep distrust of the administration that is overseeing the nationwide, untested automated polls.
Readers will also find basic information on the May elections and background materials on the candidates including their schedule and campaign movements.
This partnership is about citizen empowerment.
Elections are the fuel that keeps the engine of democracy going. They give substance to what we believe democracy is: government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
It is during elections that people decide who would be their leaders and exercise their veto power on who they believe betrayed them. For this important decision, they need accurate information to guide them.
It is in fulfillment of media’s role as messenger of information that VERA Files thought of partnering with other groups and individuals to be more effective.
Past election experience showed that mainstream media, despite their ample resources and wide reach missed out on many important stories because they tend to focus on high-profile national contests such as the presidential, senatorial and congressional elections leaving local elections in many parts of the country unnoticed and underreported.
Vote 2010 will try to bridge that gap with the help of our partners which are spread all over the country. Our CSO partners include Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM);Archdiocesan Social Action Apostolate Lingayen-Dagupan; Bangsa Moro Center for Just Peace in the Philippines (BCJP);Citizens Coalition for ARMM Electoral Refore (Citizens Care);Concerned Citizens of Abra for Good Government (CCAGG);Cor Jesu College;Diocesan Commission on Society Ministry Calapan;Green Forum Western Visayas (GF-WV);Kaisahan Tungo sa Kaunlaran ng Kanayunan at Repormang Pansakahan;Kapayapaan Kapatid Council;Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE);Movement for Principled Politics in Pampanga;National Citizens Movement for Free Elections Calabarzon;Samahan at Lingap Angat sa Mahihirap;Santungan ng Kababaihan at Kabataan sa Pampanga;Simbahan Lingkod ng Bayan (SLB)/Task Force 2010;Youth Vote Philippines.
Among our community media partners are Easter Samar Bulletin;Leyte Samar Daily Express;Mindanao Current;MindaNews;Punto Central Luzon;Radio Veritas Legazpi;Sibugay Express;West Leyte Weekly Express.
We also have institution partners:Center for People Empowerment in Governance (Cenpeg);Ploghost;Yahoo Ph! Purple Thumb.
There are also those who will be sending election-related reports in their individual capacity. They are Roslyn Arayata; Lorena Navallasca;Ronaldo Ramao;Danny Sabinoent.
The past months, we have been conducting seminar-workshops on reporting, to make sure that our partnership would produce reports that adhere to responsible journalism: accurate, fair, humane, and uncompromised.
This project, supported by The Asia Foundation and the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, aims to bring citizen journalism to another level. We hope that our reports would encourage people,not to just watch and follow but to think and act.
Wish us luck!
From Joril:
There is a suspicious marking in the Comelec’s Official Ballot which to most of us simply represents the underscoring of candidates’ aliases in the form. (Sample at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3648049&id=260545208776).
What is obvious in this Official Ballot is that the underscoring has a pattern:
1) Name of Lakas candidate was completely underlined – a long underscore.
2) LP and Independent candidate begins with a single underscore.
3) NPC, PMP and NP candidate begins with a double underscore.
What is Comelec’s use of these markings? Just highlighting the names by party affiliation?
However, to a computer programmer’s eye, these underscores represent a digital party ID of each candidate, very similar to a product barcode, which the PCOS can interpret: long underscore equals 1, single underscore equals 2, double underscore equals 3, so on and so forth.
And what’s alarming is that a cryptic computer instruction can easily use this “barcode info” to juggle election results during transmission time, ending up as a bigtime automated dagdag-bawas!
I’ve been programming for the last 20 years using one of the best computer languages available, hence, I know what I’m talking about.
I sincerely hope that Comelec has valid reasons for adopting these seemingly harmless “barcodes”, otherwise, election 2010 will be remembered as the beginning of the end of Philippine democracy.
While I am 100% in support of election automation, let’s all ensure that this process remains pure and real. Comelec must be made to explain these underscores!
It’s now confirmed that the underscoring under each candidate’s alias is actually the candidate’s party name when magnified 800%. Please visit the Comelec website at http://www.comelec.gov.ph/downloadables and choose any non-ARRM region and download the Official Ballot in pdf format.
To most of us, it would appear as a normal document, sans any fine print. On election day, every voter will have this ballot to mark off his/her choice of candidates for the government’s new leaders. After accomplishing, it is feed into an automated ballot scanner (PCOS) to ensure that his/her right to choose the nation’s leaders are perfectly protected, that the sanctity of the ballot is upheld. COMELEC has the mandate and obligation to ensure a free and pure elections: free to vote in a pure and untinted process. Indeed, successful implementation of the Automated Election System (AES) should redeem COMELEC’s tattered image as an institution. Consequently, this ballot will serve as COMELEC’s ticket to its redemption; more importantly, it is also the most important document that will redeem our nation’s battered soul.
In scanning a voter’s ballot, the only information that the PCOS looks for is the status of the oval marker at the left of each candidate’s name,whether it is marked off or not, since static data such as precinct number and BEI codes are taken up during the setup process. By reading this oval status, the PCOS can collect complete information as to the number of voters as well as valid/invalid votes cast in its assigned clustered precincts. Being a legal document, any unwanted digital marks on the ballot which the PCOS can potentially see is illegal and subject to questions that the COMELEC must answer.
And one such question that requires an answer is the seemingly harmless underscoring of each candidate’s alias, which if magnified 800%, clearly reveals the candidate’s party affiliation: Why are party names surreptitiously hidden in the Official Ballots?
Firstly, is the COMELEC aware of this breach or just an invention of Smartmatic? Secondly, if it’s a security mark, why not encrypted? And is the ink used magnetic or optically readable?
While unfair to COMELEC that one jumps to conclusion, there really is only one logical reason why these markings were included in the ballot: To enable the PCOS to know the party affiliation of each candidate while on scanning mode. But why would PCOS want to know the candidate’s party? Intentions are aplenty but let us first listen to the COMELEC (or Smartmatic) explain its side.
Perhaps the COMELEC, after all, has a valid reason for hiding party names in the Official Ballots.
Been voting with almost the same process where the ballots are tallied after the voting done (polls closed) for the Federal and Provincial elections and real time tallying for municipal and the name of candidates usually listed in the ballot in Alphabetical order with the Party opposite or underneath and a circle in line with the name where a simple X is just what is required. for municipal it is joining the lines and no Party as municipal politics is Party-less.
Now if names are similar as the possibility of having many john smiths there are, a title or nickname which a candidate is popularly known can be used opposite or underneath the name. Marking more than one x will spoil the ballot and one single X in the face of the whole ballot will count as Protest Vote. Don’t know how it is programmed, but it is also reported in the final tallying.
And it was proven so many times during protests that the process of automated counting and tallying is beyond question as it is always in agreement with the manual recounts of the ballots during the courts ordered recount to settle close contests (auto recount) and protests.
moro moro lang yan election san ba yan magtatapos kundi failure of election, si gloria uli ang leader. ikaw ba naman ang protektado ng retiradong heneral ng pnp at afp.
The true power of being informed:
Mga ahas naglabasan dahil sa init
http://www.abante.com.ph/issue/mar1310/luzon04.htm
The true power of being informed?
Mga ahas, BUWAYA’t SAWA, naglalabasan na naman dahil malapit na ang eleksiyon.
Indeed there is true power in being informed..but where do we get the right information that we need to decide who to vote..kung si Gibo kandidato daw ni putot..aminin ba ito ni Gibo?
..kung si Erap..para daw sa massa..totoo..pero hindi kaya he is running to redeem is name? sasabihin ba niya ito?
..si Villar..hindi daw siya magnanakaw..ngayon? paano ang nakuha niya via C-5? hindi siya sumipot sa investigation ng senate..paano ako maniwala sa TV ads o sa mga dadat niya?
..kung si Noynoy autistic kuno.. mayroon bang medical certification na nagpapatunay nito?
..ang question ko lang ay sino sa mga ito ang mapagpaniniwalaan na tunay ang pagkatao…one who can be trusted kahit bobo basta he can be trusted..sino sa paniwala ninyo? it is an individual choice..free choice..it is your choice! game na ba kayo?..malapit na ang a diez de Mayo…