Re-boot and Re-tool
Since Monday, June 1, 2020, the Commission on Elections has been undergoing a phased resumption of its services to the public. For now, the focus is on getting the personnel and the physical offices of the Comelec ready to receive the public. in all offices, for example, only skeleton work forces, accounting for a mere fraction of the normal work force, report for duty. While this is in part meant to ensure the safety of at-risk employees, the use of skeleton work forces is primarily intended to reduce the number of people in the office at any one time; fewer people, fewer opportunities for transmission of the virus. interestingly, there are Comelec offices that normally only have two people working in them—the Election Officer and the Election Assistant. in those cases, the need to reopen the Office and resume service to the public becomes paramount.
Reopening offices, whether at the Main Office in Intramuros or in the Comelec field offices in every city and municipality in the country, largely involves hanging up plastic barriers at service counters, setting out hand sanitizers and laying out the office space—in many cases rearranging furniture—to ensure social distancing is maintained at all times. A number of Election Officers have even instituted a “bring-your-ownpen” policy. However, even with all these measures in place, face-toface transactions are discouraged. All business with the Comelec, the guidance goes, must be conducted
via letter, e-mail, or fax.
With the quarantine looking set to continue indefinitely, there are mounting calls for many of the conventional in-person transactions— voter registration, transfer of registration, and so on—to be made available online. In response, there are many initiatives being undertaken by the Comelec now, not the least of which is the irehistro Project, which aims to bring at least part of the registration process online, as soon as possible. But in order to bring full-featured services online, there remain many challenges—technological and legal—that must first be hurdled. And so we do what we can, in the meantime.
In that spirit, my department— the Education and Information Department, or Eid—launched a discussion group called ASKCOMELEC on social media. You can see it yourself at this web address: https://facebook.com/groups/ askcomelec.
Even before the coronavirus forced humanity into a hasty retreat, the EID had already been communicating with the public via its social-media channels on Twitter, Facebook, and—sporadically—instagram. As far back as 2010, in fact, the Department had already been a staunch believer in the ability of social media to ensure that the public always had a direct line of communication to the Comelec. Even though the conversations we’ve had ranged from bantering with the public in light-hearted tomfoolery, to being on the receiving end of vitriolic hatefueled rage rants, the norm has always been a congenial and mutually respectful exchange of information. But there was a problem.
While we were able to address individual concerns, it quickly became apparent that some questions were being more frequently asked than others. There was clearly a need for an online repository of questions and answers where people could look up their concerns and find the answers they sought, ideally with minimal assistance necessary. This was particularly true for questions that kept popping up, like Voter ID questions. In fact, on the first day of GCQ in NCR, the very first time the phone rang, it was a person asking how they could get a voter ID. This, despite numerous announcements—on mass media and social media—that the Comelec no longer issued Voter IDS.
To better deal with these sort of perennial questions, we tried building an online FAQ website, but public participation—which is a critical element in meaningfully growing any sort of knowledge base—was low. The FAQ was essentially one big data dump that did not have flexibility to deal with real world questions. And, of course, FAQS on a largely static web site have little to no interactivity, making them less effective for being less engaging. So now, we’re trying again, this time with the social-media platform everyone and their dog seems to be on, using a feature which I personally became much more fluent with due to quarantine: Groups. And the initial response seems to confirm the soundness of the move, as well as keeping things hopping for my work-from-home staff.
Re-booting the operations and services of a massive government institution after more than two months of forced inactivity isn’t easy. Quickly re-tooling those operations and services to cope with circumstances no one foresaw isn’t a walk in the park either. But this is the hand we’ve been dealt, and the Comelec is here for the public that needs, more than ever, a fully functioning democracy.