PPCRV taps youth for voter education

The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) is tapping the youth to educate voters nationwide in choosing the right candidates in the May 13 senatorial and local elections.

In an interview Wednesday night with The Chiefs on Cignal TV’s One News channel, PPCRV executive director Maria Isabel Buenaobra said that contrary to perception, young people are interested and willing to contribute for the country’s better future.

“We ask them to volunteer, guard the votes, disseminate information on responsible voting. They want to do something for the country and we want to encourage them to do that,” Buenaobra noted.

The PPCRV, Buenaobra said, has launched the free voters’

education online course and is currently recruiting 300,000 volunteers to serve as poll watchers, help in the unofficial canvassing of votes as well as assist in the voters’ education campaign.

Buenaobra, however, stressed that PPCRV is recruiting non-partisan youth volunteers or those who do not actively campaign for candidates.

“They have to be non-partisan, the dioceses recruiting the volunteers screen them to ensure they don’t have candidates whom they are actively campaigning for,” she said.

In educating voters, Buenaobra said, PPCRV volunteers only provide criteria in selecting the right candidate without mentioning names.

“We want the voters to use their own discerning powers in selecting candidates, based on our criteria,” she said. Despite the advent of social media, voters are still hungry for news and still need to know whether information is factual or not, she said.

According to Buenaobra, social media was a game changer in the 2016 elections and still is in the coming polls.

“Social media was such a big influence in the last elections, like overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) were influenced by news, whether fake news fed to them by relatives. For Facebook, you can actually sway voters,” she pointed out.

For this reason, Buenaobra said voters’ education could help OFWs make the right choice by teaching them not to consider those who give groceries, but by thinking of the future of their children.

She said that there are 2.5 million first-time youth voters and 25 million youth who are glued to technology, thus the need for voters’ education to teach them what to look for in a candidate and fact-check the information from social media.

University of the Philippines journalism professor Rachel Khan, who is also from fact-checking and anti-disinformation initiative Tsek.ph., encouraged voters to verify all the information they are getting by using fact checking website.

She said Tsek.ph. is available for everyone to distinguish fact from disinformation used to mislead the voting public.

Khan said trust in social media has been eroded because of the last elections. But in the coming elections, she said information can be immediately verified through their site.

She said voters should still look at the brand, for not all fact-checking websites can be trusted.