Did you cast your vote in yesterday’s National Elections?

I know, everyone is talking about the Philippine Elections. So apologies for posting non-travel related post. Did you cast your vote yesterday? How was your experience?

Precinct0345A Waiting Room

Since 2003, I have been a registered voter of Pasay City after I moved residence from Bacolod City. Since then I have been voting in Precinct 0345A in Jose Rizal Elementary School.

But since after Holy Week, I have already moved residence here in Santa Rosa, Laguna, but my voter’s record is still in Pasay. So that means, I have to travel all the way from Laguna to cast my vote and be part of history.

Even before I left home, I have already been monitoring Twitter, Facebook and local TV channels and all of them reporting chaos in voting precincts. A lot of voters got disenfranchised.

Some even reported to have been on the queue for like, 2 hours just to vote. Tsk tsk.

I arrived in my polling place, half an hour before 12 noon. I guess everybody was just busy taking their lunch. The queue in our precint is quite fast. Not as what I had expected earlier. Guess, what, it only took me a little over 30 minutes from falling in line down to feeding the ballot to the PCOS machine. It was fast!

The queue in our precinct is very organized. Instead of just falling in line outside of the classroom, we just seated at the chairs properly arranged in a room next to the polling precinct.

The poll watchers of various political parties maintain order in the queue, and they rally made sure no one makes singit in between the line.

The Board of Election Inspectors in our precinct is very efficient too. Upon arrival, we got to sign the document containing our name, with a photo beside it. We were supposed to place thumbmark on the document, but explained that we’ll just do it afterwards to prevent the ballot from getting stained.

I then got my ballot from the chair of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs). The .voting process itself is quite fast. It took me less than 3 minutes to shade the names of the candidates that I voted.

From there, I then had to feed my ballot to the PCOS machine. At first my ballot got rejected. But the BEI head asked my to try inserting the ballot face down. Luckily I was accepted! Sigh of relief.

But while I was all praises for the people in my precinct, I just can’t stand seeing this tricycle parked right inside the school. It carries a banner of a presidential candidate.

I do not know if this is allowed. And while we got to hear tons of complaints about the delay in the voting process, the busted PCOS Machines, ballots that were not read by the machine, etc, I am overwhelmed at how fast the results are delivered right now.

There may still be lapses in some areas of the electoral system, but I guess, this is already a very big leap from the archaic process that we were used to, the mano mano style

How about you? How’s your voting experience? How many hours did you fall in line? Did you also experience error in feeding your ballot?

Share your thoughts here!