One of the biggest complaints people have about the satellite registration centers of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) is that some have been announcing “cutoffs” in the middle of the day. To the minds of most people, cutoffs—which typically occur two or three hours after the centers open—are a direct contravention of the Comelec’s announcement of these centers as operating on a 12-hour day.
I know that sounds like a reasonable conclusion but, unwittingly or otherwise, it is a conclusion based on the assumption that voter registration is a simple matter of the Comelec receiving application forms and little else. It isn’t.
The filing of applications is a three-step process. First, the preparatory step which includes getting and filling out application forms; second, the application proper, where the applicant submits his accomplished application form and is interviewed by the election officer—for the purpose of determining his actual residency; and third, biometrics capture. For purposes of determining when to announce the cutoff, registration centers take into account the time it takes to complete the second and third steps (remember this point because it will be important later).
Consider this.
Assuming that the election officer rushes through the interview, he processes one person every minute; depending on the applicant’s ability to follow instructions, biometrics capture can take as little as two, bringing the total amount of time spent on steps two and three to the very ideal total of three minutes per applicant.
Three minutes per applicant, with 300 applicants waiting to be served, translates to 900 minutes of processing time. That’s 15 hours—well beyond the 12-hour working day. Where do those 300 applicants come from? Nowadays, those 300 applicants are the ones who arrive at the registration centers earliest.
This automatically excludes—via the cutoff announcement—those who come to the registration centers at the 11th hour, loudly berating the Comelec staff for not accepting their applications.
Now, where steps two and three—receiving the application form plus election officer interview, and biometrics capture—are critical for determining when cutoffs are called, step one—the queuing for the forms and filling up the forms prior to submission—is key to the public’s frustration. Here’s why: When you go to any registration center now and until the end of the registration period on the 31st of October, about half of the people you see queuing are probably waiting to get application forms. At first glance, you would think that this is an easy operation, involving only, well, the giving out of forms. Wrong again.
Many people don’t remember what a bank deposit slip looks like, let alone those island counters in the middle of the bank where there are all sorts of slips of different colors. In a bank, the client is expected to go to those islands, get the appropriate form they need, and then fill it out. This is the same basic setup in a registration center except that the Comelec’s clients don’t always know what kind of form they need. So, in the giving out of forms, Comelec staff have to be on hand to determine the proper form to give the applicant. Again, you might say that this sounds like a straightforward affair, but then again you would be wrong.
Taking just first-time voters (FTVs), for example, consider applicants who come asking for registration forms for FTVs. This request cannot be granted, however, without first verifying that the applicant truly is an FTV. This means that every request for a form has to be validated by checking what is called the National List of Registered Voters, or NLRV. If the applicant shows up on this list, he obviously cannot be given an FTV form. Again, this process necessarily takes time, especially in cases of particularly quarrelsome applicants who insist that they’ve never registered but whose names are clearly on the record. And as I said, that’s just one example.
All told, with people arriving at a faster clip than they can be processed—both for the release of application forms and for the application proper—the queues lengthen with the exuberance of rush-hour Edsa traffic buildup. Is it any wonder then that the levels of frustration are so similar?
Has the Comelec tried to mitigate any of these problems? Of course.
The period of registration has gone on for about 17 months—one of the longest ever, coupled with an aggressive satellite registration plan that effectively had registration running seven days a week, including holidays. The call for registration and validation has been taken up by nearly everyone with a soapbox, and they have not let up since the beginning, making this registration cycle the most consistently carried by the media in our electoral history. The Comelec has rolled out iRehistro, an online application for filling out application forms. Election officers have pushed staff to cut down processing time to under two minutes, additional voter registration machines continue to be fielded even as you are reading this. Still, there’s only so much mitigation that can be effective when people still refuse to come early and still insist on denying the reality that any system, no matter how efficient, will have its limits.
Too bad the Comelec can’t say we told you so.
****
James Arthur B. Jimenez is director of the Commission on Elections’s education and information department.
2 comments
When a bank says it’s open from 9-3 it means it’s open from 9-3 TO THE PUBLIC. While the bank employees likely worked longer than 9-3, that is of no concern to the PUBLIC.
Why say 12 hour work if you can only SERVICE the public from 9-12?
Deception? Pa POGI?
Hay, Comelec nga naman. Jimenez ikaw ba nag announced ng 12 hour work day?
Its very simple….tanga talaga……give the first 100-300 applicants who can be processed queue numbers and let the other applicants go home to come on the next day. Man the post by rotation so that it is not left vacant at any time of the mandatory hours which the COMELEC is supposed to process applications. TANGA TANGA.