Spot the wrong...

This photo appears to be not out of the ordinary, does it? It is the cashier station of the SM Appliance Store at the SM Seaside Mall just south of Cebu city.

But look closely. There is something very wrong the in they way they do business. Can you tell what it is? What could be the reasons for this? Please post in the comments section.

Incomplete reporting by the Comelec

At this link you will find the National Board of Canvassers' resolution 10-13 of June 5, 2013 officially proclaiming the results of the senatorial race: http://www.comelec.gov.ph/uploads/Elections/2013natloc/res/nboc_res_001013.pdf

A few questions begged to be asked:

1.  How many established and clustered precincts did these results come from?

2.  What is the total number of voters who voted?

3.  Of this number (in 2), how many voted for senators?

4.  What is the average number of candidates voted?

5.  How many over-voted for senators?

6.  How many ballots were spoiled or uncounted (this is referred to as a spoiled ballot rate)?

In this day and age of technology and electronics in elections, the figures would certainly help:

1) enhance the credibility of the election by making the results audit-able;

2) inform the political parties, candidates, academe, and voter outreach programs about how might voters view the candidates and why voters do not (historically) vote for 12 senators; and

3) guide candidates who wish to lodge a protest if results could be overturned if over-voted, blank votes or undervoted, and rejected or spoiled ballots are reviewed.

For the May polls, there were 52,014,846 [http://bit.ly/ZEd52D, Comelec] voters, and 39,898,992 voted (turnout of 75.72 percent) [http://bit.ly/15W1D7D, Rappler]. The Comelec tallied the total valid votes  for senators at 298,625,797. So the fill up rate is 7.6.

How would all the other contests -- party-list, district representatives to Congress, provincial governors, vice-governors, provincial councilors, mayors, vice-mayors, and local councilors -- look like if all the figures above were reported alongside the results of the voting?

Comelec is remiss in their duty in reporting election results.  Seriously, I think the Comelec needs to just be serious about their work.  What do you think?

From within the womb of Mother Earth we have wounded Her

(in memory of Mohammad Bouazizi)

From within the womb of Mother Earth we have wounded Her
Our ways wasteful and careless
We have wanted too much
Consumed very much more
For insatiable want we abandoned sustainability

Now Mother Earth is hurting
A dry spell there, floods elsewhere
Russian drought, scarce food
A government is taken down, Tunisia
Impact, Arab Spring?

Floods in Pakistan, the world comes to rescue
Too much a disaster to ignore, to be indifferent
Inches more of snow, fierce tornadoes
Unprecedented high water and temperature
Mounts of ice melt, seas swell and surge

One organism are we
In the womb of Mother Earth
Generations are nil for
From within we kill

"Mohammad Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian whose suicide on December 17 sparked unprecedented clashes in the Northern African country, will go down in history as the street vendor who toppled the regime of President Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali, who ruled Tunisia with an iron fist for more than two decades. The suicide was embraced as a cause by jobless graduates, trade unionists and human right activists, and the protests later spread to other towns including the capital, Tunis.

"Bouazizi set himself ablaze in Sidi Bouzid, a town in central Tunisia, after a woman municipality agent confiscated the weighing scales he was using to sell fruits and vegetables off a cart, which was his only available mean to support his family, and slapped him. Bouazizi did not accept the public humiliation and went to the local governorate building to report the incident. However, he was barred from entering and nobody wanted to listen to his plight. Angry, humiliated and desperate, Bouazizi drenched himself in petrol and set himself ablaze outside the local governor's office.

"His mother, according to the Washington Post reporter said, 'It was not poverty that made her son sacrifice himself.... It was his quest for dignity.'" [added 24 January 2014, from Duty: Memoirs Of A Secretary of War, Robert Gates, 2014]

"The entire Sidi Buzid town erupted in anger. Soon, protesters started calling for the resignation of the president. Twenty-eight days later, Bin Ali stepped down and Bouazizi became the symbol of the Tunisian uprising."

to Ms Heidi Mendoza

Thank you so very much for your committed and courageous act of coming out to expose the corruption in the Philippine military.

Our prayers go to you and your loved ones for your safety; and to others (like me), so that we will continue to be inspired by you and do our little share of working for positive change for our country and our people.

Please do not heed as much the snipes of those who say that you are destroying the image of the institution (the Commission on Audit) as the ones whose hearts are with you because they believe that you are in fact restoring the public's trust on it.

Stay strong and keep well.

OnePercentLegacy: Protecting Investments on Public Projects

The OnePercentLegacy is a proposed undertaking for the National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel, www.namfrel.com.ph) to support its work in monitoring the procurement processes by various government agencies.  It is akin to a social audit or social accountability, according to Philippine Budget Management department secretary, Florencio Abad.

The value proposition of the OnePercentLegacy is citizens can effectively help track and report progress of public projects at less than one percent of the project cost.  This will be done with the collaboration of the funding or contracting agencies and with trained volunteers. The data capture system will use an inclusive (built-for-participation) technology-enabled data portal, and the information collected will be integrated with that of the contracting agency’s own monitoring and evaluation system.

Trained volunteers of Namfrel will monitor and report project progress using tools like the mobile phones and cameras. They will also use specific checklists and on-line tools customized to the project being monitored. Anyone close to the project sites, like in places where a school building or a bridge is being built, could send spot reports using SMS, videos, photographs, or in oral or spoken form.  These pieces of information will serve as third-party inputs to the overall project monitoring process.

The one percent figure taken from the cost of a public project is both symbolic and actual.  The nominal cost is positioned to be attractive and acceptable to the contracting and funding agencies, like the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank.  It is symbolic because over time, as more and more individuals participate in the process, each contribution becomes infinitesimally small as the total contribution by citizens becomes infinitely large.  The equivalent of one-percent-of-project-cost, as the cost of this social audit, will be actual and will set the benchmark for efficiency. It may not be breached regardless of the kind of project.

Information gathered from the OnePercentLegacy project will hopefully provide bilateral and multi-lateral public project fund (loan) providers a rationale to allocate funds for social audit by citizens.  This small investment to engage citizens will be used to help protect the larger investments they made the fund providers made on the public projects.

A pilot-test of the key deliverables and value-added will be carried out in the next few months.  The first applications will be in Namfrel's current monitoring programs.  Once the concept is proven feasible and sufficient operational knowledge has been accumulated, the OnePercentLegacy would be propagated in  other parts of the world.  This would be done by the funding agencies, by Namfrel or by third-party proponents.

Background on Namfrel

Namfrel is a non-partisan volunteer domestic election observation group founded in 1983 in the Philippines.  It was first of it's kind in the world.  It has carried out transparency and accountability-promotion projects in the past.  In 1987 in observed the bidding and project execution of small infrastructure projects by the department of Public Works and Highways in a program to create one million jobs nationwide.  In 2003, the department of Education engaged Namfrel to monitor the delivery of textbooks to public high schools and elementary schools.

Since then Namfrel continues be observe the procurement processes of the department of Education and the department of Health.  The department of Public Works and Highways and the department of Interior and Local Government have recently invited Namfrel to participate in the procurement processes and track the implementation of their projects.

Seeking your inputs

I would like to hear your thoughts on how the OnePercentLegacy could be improved and delivered well.  Do write in the comment section or send an email to OnePercentLegacy@gmail.com.  Better yet send in a video of you giving your comments.  Thank you very much.

(The author is a volunteer of Namfrel since 1986.  He served as executive director from 1997 to 2003.  He has been a member of the national council from 2009 up to the present.  He has observed elections in many countries since 1994 and has worked with the National Democratic Institute (ndi.org) in Afghanistan, Timor Leste and Bangladesh.  This project is dedicated to the volunteers of Namfrel who have offer time, talent and treasure to protect the integrity of Philippine elections.  For the nine Namfrel volunteers who offered the ultimate sacrifice to country, this project of vigilance and citizen oversight is offered so that their deaths would not been in vain.) (Text revised on 2011 Feb 16)