Covering automated elections,
uncovering campaign finance

The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism is conducting 12 training seminars for local and national journalists from print, broadcast, and the web. The seminars deal with how to cover the May 2010 automated elections, and how to probe into the election finances of secretive candidates. The PCIJ is part of the 2010 Pera at Pulitika Network set up by media and civil society groups in cooperation with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Beginning December 11, Friday, PCIJ trainors will be holding their fifth training seminar for 20 journalists at the Oxford Hotel in the former Clark airbase in Pampanga. This is a live training blog of the seminar.

Day 1, Dec. 11 2009

Expectations of seminar participants

Khristine Pulumbarit of Philippine Online Chronicles

Elena Luna, NBN-4

Maila Ager, Inquirer.net

Evening Session: Media and Election Laws

Atty Luie Guia of the lawyers’ group Libertas briefed participating journalists on the important laws that will govern the coming 2010 elections.

Atty Guia explained that the mother law governing Philippine elections is still Batas Pambansa 881, or the Omnibus Election Code. The problem with BP881 is that it was passed in 1985, and is in many ways already outdated. For example, BP881 was passed at a time when the country was still under a different Constitution, governed by a strongman, with laws passed by a unicameral legislature whose members have a term of office of six years. While much has changed since the Omnibus Election Code was passed, there have been few significant changes in election laws since then. The obsolescense of some of the Code’s provisions means that several rules that still govern our elections are no longer practical or realistic.

Atty. Luie Guia explains how some voters become double registrants by mistake

Election cheating has evolved by leaps and bounds in the past few years. Atty. Guia points out that cheating was often done before in the precinct level. But recent elections have shown a shift to wholesale cheating at the canvassing level.

With the automation of next year’s elections, Atty. Guia stresses the need to probe the vulnerabilities of the new system in other to make it more foolproof. The automation changes the rules of the game radically. This means voters and civil society groups must rethink the way they have always guarded the ballot, in the same way that election cheaters are thinking up new ways to use the automation to tamper with the results.