Proactive youth: register and vote

This guy and what he’s saying deserves more attention. Watch, register and vote…

We’ve got 30 days ’till October 31, 2009… last big push! Let’s aim for 1 Million more registrants and show the candidates that we mean business!

Juana Change MTV!

Here’s something for videoke-loving advocates out there…

YouthVote marks first year, steps up campaign

Roughly two months before voter registration ends, YouthVotePhilippines, a network of progressive, reform-minded youth groups and organizations working toward voters’ registration, education and empowerment, marks its first year stepping up the next phases of their campaign.

“We’re already moving more towards the voter education and agenda-building phases in our four-point program,” said Ching Jorge, YouthVote lead convener. “Of course we also continue to encourage the youth to register, but we’re now focused on getting them informed even before election campaign starts.”

YouthVote has launched its candidate monitoring site early this year in an effort to inform voters on the stand of presidential aspirants on the issues concerning the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a baseline measure of human development. “The next president will have to report the progress of these goals to the United Nations in 2015 and we want to make sure that these issues will be part of the candidates’ platforms,” Jorge added.

“After the filing of candidacy, we would update the candidates featured on the website and transform it into something like a monitoring tool,” said Jaime Garchitorena, YouthVote’s information technology lead. He explained that the group is already working on an MDG monitoring tool that would enable anyone to assess and record whether certain conditions in their area have improved or not. “We want to make sure that people will hold the elected candidates responsible.”

“Accountability is a key factor of civic engagement,” added Tanya Hamada, YouthVote’s regional coordinator, “and we want to make sure that after the hype of the elections, the alliance we built, especially in the regions, will remain a force of reform.”

On September 26, YouthVote will conduct a youth forum on the 2010 elections and the MDGs at the University of the Philippines Diliman. The program includes a workshop-training of youth leaders on social accountability.

Last Friday, YouthVote conducted a time-and-motion study on filling up the new ballot that will be used for the automated elections at the First Asia Institute of Technology and Humanities (FAITH) in Tanauan, Batangas. Results show that, on average, it may take 8 minutes and 4 seconds to fill up the proposed ballot.

“We thought it better to experiment and investigate instead of whining about automated elections,” said Garchitorena. “I think the youth and the public in general deserves to know the facts of this new technology and process.”

YouthVote designed an improvised ballot, using substitute questions for 32 electoral positions with 339 candidates printed on both sides of the paper. The ballot, which measured 25 inches, was based on the latest sample design of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC).

In an exit survey, the students generally had positive feedback and noted that shading the circles was most helpful, while the length of ballot was least helpful. Close to 700 college students, all of voting age, participated in the simulation.

The activity was the group’s proactive response to concerns regarding difficulties and delays that might be caused by shading the ballot and clustering of precincts in the coming elections. The COMELEC plans to collapse the existing 320,415 voting precincts into 80,146 clustered precincts in order to match the available 82,200 counting machines, also known as PCOS (Precinct Count Optical Scan). The new set up will cluster up to 1,000 registered voters in every precinct, which will be open for 11 hours.

Early last year, YouthVote has already engaged in dialogues with COMELEC to immediately resume voter registration to accommodate more new registrants. They have since been working with the COMELEC ensuring that the youth would be a significant voice in the 2010 elections and have lobbied for a petition outlining four (4) possible areas where it can help COMELEC address some limitations of the registration process for students and young professionals who are away from their areas of residence: 1) utilizing schools for a registration/information campaign; 2) expanding the availability of registration materials to schools and the Internet; 3) setting-up satellite registration centers or field mobile registration units; and 4) assigning additional special registration days each first Saturday of the month.

Why vote?

Why would you vote? Know the issues and make a stand.