Out of civic duty, not for money

Uriel Quilinguing .

COMPENSATIONS for services rendered must be commensurate to the knowledge, experience and skill of the person, including the duration of time spent, and the risks one must undergo to perform mandated tasks. These apply to the poll workers who rendered services in the May 13 midterm elections. They are the members of the board of election inspectors (BEI), an election board chairperson and two board members, a department of education supervisor officer (Deso) and support staff deserved attention.

At this time, most of the 500,000 teachers nationwide, who served in the elections, may have received their corresponding honoraria, as stipulated by the Election Service Reform Act (ESRA): P6,000 for the BEI chairperson, P5,000 each for BEI members, P4,000 for the Deso, and P2,000 for the support staff, while all of them have additional P1,000 each transportation allowance.

One of the encouraging announcements the Commission on Elections had was the payment of the honoraria in cash, thus doing away with the cash cards which were attributed to the delays in payments in the past elections. Other than this, was Comelec’s timely downloading of funds and payroll preparation at the city and municipal levels.

The system must have delivered positive results and that most of those rendered services and received their pay are satisfied with the amount and contented with the mode of payment. There have been no formal complaints, that he not received what is due to him.

Mediakonek, however, does not believe the amount of honorarium each one of them received was fairly commensurate, that the pegged amount for all the half-a-million souls compensated the services rendered, the responsibilities performed, the initiatives manifested, decision-making and, of course, the completion of the deliverables.

Voting period was intended for 12 hours, from six in the morning until six in the evening. But the entire process, granting everything went smoothly, may have extended beyond 12 hours, including the transmission of results, printing of election returns and the canvass of election returns. This, notwithstanding the compulsion on the teachers to wake up earlier than normal and to be at the voting center at least an hour before the arrival of voters. 

Most of us may have seen on TV screens how some members of the BEI brought the vote-counting machine (VCM), voter registration verification machine (VRVM) and election paraphernalia to remote and hardly inaccessible areas. There were those who braved crossing rivers, passed through deplorable roads on horseback or carabao-back a day before the scheduled elections.

And, what about those who have been held hostage by their tasks, who could not free themselves just because there were transmission failures, and just because the secure digital (SD) cards should be reconfigured by information technology experts.

For those assigned in missionary areas and those who encountered mechanical and technical glitches, and must have to extend beyond 12 hours, the honoraria that they are entitled would not be compensating and commensurate to the stress, lack of sleep, fear, fatique, thirst and hunger these poll workers experienced.  

While the honorarium rate for 12 hours of work may be enough, yet the next 12 and succeeding hours must be considered for additional pay to be fair and in recognition of the extended hours of work. Having the total amount of honoraria free of the proposed five-percent tax is commendable.

These machines that are intended to make the electoral exercise fully automated are nothing without the poll workers, if they are not compensated well. Many are there, not for the money, but out of their civic duty to ensure it was a clean, honest, accurate, meaningful and peaceful (Champ) elections.

(Uriel Quilinguing is a former editor-in-chief of this paper and past president of the Cagayan de Oro Press Club.)