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Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Poll body clueless on how to verify signatures
CEBU CITY -- It WILL take a while for efforts to amend the 1987 Constitution to prosper in Cebu City after local poll officers said they have no way to verify the signatures gathered in the people's initiative campaign.
The local poll office also cannot start processing the signed forms since there are no instructions yet from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) central office, City Election Officer Simaco Labata said.
"There is no order from Comelec Manila regarding the matter and even if there was, we cannot verify the signatures because we have no basis for verification since all our voters' records are in Manila," he told Sun.Star Cebu.
The local poll office's list of voters and book of voters containing the voters' registration records were sent to Manila for review shortly after the 2004 elections, in relation to the election protest filed by former senator John Henry "Sonny" Osmeña.
The signatures gathered over the weekend are not final yet since they need at least three percent of the total number of voters in each district to call for a plebiscite.
Governor Gwendolyn Garcia, meanwhile, will not allow herself to be involved in the people's initiative to amend the Constitution, saying political meddling in the signature campaign is not needed.
"I suppose the very reason why this people's initiative generates so much suspicion is that politicians may be behind this. I won't involve myself in this process. Let the process take its course without any meddling from politicians," she said.
Garcia also pointed out that there are legal challenges for those who started the process.
On the verification of signatures, Labata suggested that the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Cebu City office, whose staff distributed the signature campaign forms, communicate with the Comelec central office for the latter to assign the local poll offices to verify the signatures.
Until Senator Osmeña's protest at the Senate Electoral Tribunal is resolved, Comelec Cebu City cannot get its voters' records.
But if they are ordered by Comelec Manila to find ways to verify the signatures, Labata said they can do so by summoning all those who signed the people's initiative forms and requiring them to affix their signatures on Comelec documents.
In a radio dyLA interview Monday morning, DILG Cebu City Chief Patricio Gabuya said the signatures they gathered over the weekend will be forwarded to the Comelec soon.
The signing of the forms by the voters, he added, was purely voluntary and no one was coerced into signing them.
He also said his office did not initiate the campaign and that they merely distributed the forms.
"We didn't have a hand in that, igo ra mi nagdistribute sa forms na gikan sa Union of Local Authority of the Philippines," he said.
Gabuya also said that even before the barangay assembly last Saturday, they already instructed Comelec to inform all barangay captains to explain the Charter change issue to their constituents before they gather signatures.
"It is now up to Comelec to verify the procedures and to check if the captains indeed explained the matter to those who signed because we're not privy to what the barangay officials did," he said in the interview.
At City Hall, Mayor Tomas Osmeña said he will not spoil the signature campaign even if he is against amending the Constitution.
"I think it's also important for our congressmen to look good at their party, otherwise, they might lose their pork barrel and their projects for their district....So I said let's just give them the signatures but once it goes down to the plebiscite, I'm against it," he said.
Osmeña explained he is against a Charter change because one of the major changes proposed will keep the public from choosing the head of state, a task that will be left to the members of Parliament alone.
In a text message sent to Sun.Star Cebu, Akbayan Cebu secretary-general Alvin Dizon said DILG officials "should be held responsible for allowing themselves to be used as machinery of President Arroyo's sinister, illegal and unconstitutional people's initiative."
"It's a clear violation of the Local Government Code, which prescribes public officials and employees in general from campaigning on partisan politics," his message read. (LCR of Sun.Star Cebu)
(March 28, 2006 issue)
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