No more mandatory election service for nation’s teachers

FOR as long as people can remember, public school teachers have been at the center of Philippine elections, checking arriving voters against precinct lists, giving them their ballots to fill up, and generally telling them how to go about casting their votes.

For the first time, in next year’s elections, many precincts in the country may be manned instead by other government employees or even by private individuals, with the approval of House Bill 5412 by the House of Representatives. The bill provides that teachers’ services in elections shall no longer be compulsory. They have the option to decline election service, in which case the Comelec may call on others in a list of approved substitutes to take their place.

The services of public school teachers may have originally been thought of because Philippine elections have always been held in public schools. Over the years, however, some teachers’ organizations deplored the mandatory nature of the assignment. There were also complaints of late payments of allowances.

And there was the threat of violence in some parts of the country from some political leaders and their followers. In the old days, teachers, at great danger to themselves, personally carried the ballot boxes to the municipal building at the end of the precinct count. A least two teachers lost their lives when they refused to surrender their ballot boxes to armed men in Batangas in 1995 and in 2010.

The danger to teachers in precincts has been considerably lessened by the automation of elections. They no longer have to stay up to late at night, or sometimes even up till morning, to count the ballots one by one. They no longer have to personally carry the ballot boxes to the municipal center, because the precinct results are automatically transmitted. Thus, during the Comelec hearings on proposals for hybrid elections – manual counting in the old way combined with electronic transmission of results – the teachers were among those who opposed the proposal.

The House-approved bill for non-compulsory services of teachers in elections still has to be approved by the Senate and the final version signed into law by President Aquino. But the legislators who worked for the bill hope it will be in effect for the election on May 9, 2016, seven months from now.

The Comelec itself is confident that there will still be many public school teachers who will accept election service. It needs about 100,000 members of precinct Boards of Election Inspectors (BEI) all over the country. Should there be vacancies in some precincts, they will be filled up with private school teachers, Department of Education (DepEd) personnel, other government employees, members of Comelec-accredited citizen organizations, and any citizen of known probity and conscience.

In approving HB 5412, the members of Congress want to relieve teachers of the additional burden of mandatory election service on top of their already very important work of educating the nation’s youth. They should go further in helping the teachers by granting them the benefits of increased pay and easing their tax problems by reforming the tax laws. There are bills on these pending in Congress and there is still time to act on them if the legislators will it.