THE National Citizens’ Movement for Free Election (Namfrel) is now eyeing to recruit at least 50,000 volunteers for the upcoming May 2022 polls.
In a virtual forum on Sunday, Namfrel chairman Augusto “Gus” C. Lagman disclosed they have already started their volunteer recruitment, which they will be deploying to monitor the conduct of the next polls in the precinct level.
“We are recruiting at least 50,000 [volunteers], but hopefully we can recruit 100,000 [volunteers] since there are over 100,000 precincts,” Lagman said.
“If we cannot reach the [100,000] target, then the 50,000 volunteers will each be assigned with two precincts. That is our recruitment plan for now,” he added.
Currently, he admitted they are having trouble getting enough volunteers who are willing to help in their monitoring and parallel vote tabulation in the actual 2022 elections, as well as the manual random audit and creation of the open election data after the activity.
“Even if we made commitments last December that they will join us, some of them will later say they are already busy because it will still be a long time before the election. So we cannot expect their commitment,” Lagman said.
He said they hope this will change when they resume their recruitment in January and February this year.
“I hope they will become volunteers of Namfrel so they can help in the conduct of a clean election,” Namfrel said.
To qualify as a Namfrel volunteer, he said an applicant must be non-partisan, will comply with anti-Covid-19 guidelines as well as regulations of the Commission on Elections and Namfrel regulations.
The Namfrel head said applicants, who are barangay officials of barangay tanod or have been convicted of any election offense or crime, will be banned from volunteering.
Interest volunteers may register at https://namfrel.org.ph.