Unfortunate reversal

EXERCISING the right to suffrage is a recurring nightmare for many a voter. In this country where the latest-model luxury cars and top-of-the-line iPhones are no longer stuff to gawk or gape at, voting is a ceremony to test even the most conscientious. One rises early to beat a path to the old schoolhouse whose classrooms serve as election precincts, searches for and locates one’s precinct, takes a position cheek by jowl with others crowding around the list of voters, and, having found oneself duly accredited (if one is lucky), proceeds to perform one’s patriotic duty.

Indeed, the school polling precincts to where voters traditionally troop are more often than not stations of discomfort. Voters may be forced to stand in a queue outdoors, in summer’s searing heat; the toilet facilities are often overwhelmed, and the classrooms are always underventilated.

This clumsy, torturous manner of voting promised to be eased somewhat when the Commission on Elections voted some months ago to allow mall voting. The malls were, after all, a commonsensical alternative, as the Comelec appeared to have recognized. In fact, it had earlier conscripted the malls for its biometrics campaign—a sensible move, given that most urban citizens have taken to these well-maintained, air-conditioned oases of comfort and convenience as the new town plazas, where everything from Sunday Mass to fitness rallies is now held.

Imagine how pleased senior citizens and persons with disabilities were at the prospect of voting in comfort. (The delight of the teachers who would have been stationed at the mall precincts cannot be discounted.) But their satisfaction was short-lived, with the news that mall voting will no longer be allowed, ostensibly because the Omnibus Election Code does not allow the transfer of polling precincts within 45 days before a regular election. Apparently, the Comelec began the process of installing polling places in the malls “barely 19 days before Election Day (May 9),” according to former commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal, who initiated the complaint against the move “because, procedurally, mall voting does not comply with the requirements of the law.”

The kink, in other words, is merely of timing: The formal decision to use the malls as alternative voting places came too late. How unfortunate. It would appear now that the Comelec had too much on its hands, possibly including undoing what previous election administrations had put in place, to realize that when it ran its biometrics campaign in the malls, covering the next step—authorizing mall voting to allow the same voters to enjoy the same convenience when casting their ballot—had to be made before the prohibition on the movement of polling places took effect.

The reversal of the Comelec’s earlier decision favoring mall voting is truly unfortunate in view of not only efforts but also expenditures—by both the Comelec and its mall partners—going down the drain. Also, the poll body had already sent out voter information sheets to a number of those who it said would have benefited from the mall voting—as many as 231,174 regular voters. Those voters include the infirm and the elderly, who would now again have to line up, join the throng, and endure the considerable inconvenience of voting in the old election precincts. People like Rosita Tumabini, 68, who, according to a report in this paper, walks with crutches, one of her legs having been amputated due to diabetes complications. “It was a breeze when I registered as a voter at the mall,” she said, and proceeded to air her plea: “I hope the Comelec reconsiders its decision and be more considerate of our physical condition.”

Can exemptions be reasonably made? Is the law so harsh that it will not avert its stony glare from one, and hundreds of thousand others like her, so disadvantaged?