Election Buzz

(POL SCI 11 crap)

It was not the reaction I expected from myself. Initially, I knew that when the moment came for me to cast that very important vote, I would be head over heels in excitement. For the few months that preceded May 10, 2010 elections, I was all jittery and excited to finally exercise my right to vote – for the first time. But when it came to the day of the election, I was surprised. I was totally calm, as if it was just any other regular day. Maybe because I thought about it too much for a very long period of time that it kind of just settled in me, I don’t know. All I know is that when I woke up on that day, sped down the street from my house to my precinct located in Magsaysay Memorial Elementary School in Pulantubig, waited patiently in line, and finally shaded those circles, and fed the long ballot sheet to the brand new PCOS machine, I felt deep satisfaction.

But that wasn’t everything that happened to me that day. Probably the most terrible thing to happen to me was that I waited in line for more than 2 hours! It is just sad to note that some of the main things that were supposed to be addressed in this new mode of elections didn’t come to light. One of the reasons why the automated elections bill was passed was because people generally wanted to have a fuss-free, efficient election process. Instead, there were clustered precincts, up to 6 precincts to one machine, which makes assigning precincts particularly useless at the end of the day. There might be good reasons for this problematic area. Maybe they had problems with spending too much on a one day national event, or there simply just wasn’t enough money to handle having one machine per precinct. Or maybe they just oversaw their estimated time of voting per person. I am generally calm about oversights such as these, but what I couldn’t handle were the people around me outside my precinct complaining shamelessly about the inefficiency of the activity. I do not blame the PPCRV, I actually commend them for handling such stressful gatherings well. And I couldn’t blame the people around me, they were just participants in this raucous event. Although I could blame them for not having enough patience for just this one day, anyway work has been cut short for the day, so they had no reason to actually hurry up.

And then there were the machines themselves. It was a pretty good idea to have the automated elections. It speeded up the counting, and thus spared us of the stress of waiting for days to receive the official results. But, in every human endeavor, there will always be mistakes. Around 300 or so machines needed to be replaced because they acted up, creating chaos in some poll areas. But if you think about it, out of a total of 7,600 PCOS machines, 300 is actually a pretty good number. As foreseen, the 300 snuggly fit into the allowed percentage range for problem machines.

In all its discerning significance, these elections have marked incredibly well in our history. I believe that these historic elections contained the most young voters in our election history. It was a well informed race, and generally speaking, a peaceful endeavor. It is hoped that this step in our politics will herd in a new set of leaders capable of steering our fatherland into a better, if not the best, nation.

I didn’t want to mention the people responsible for the names listed on the ballots, but they can’t be avoided. I have accepted the fact that they are the best choices we have for now, and whoever wins shall have the support of every Filipino, God-willing. The only problem left now: Who will clean up the mess of the campaigns?