Tuesday, November 20, 2007 Editorial: Disenfranchised?
FOLK from different villages of Porac trooped to the town's central school in Barangay Poblacion over the weekend for a common purpose -- vote for their town's director in the Pampanga Electric Cooperative (Pelco) 2 board.
To their disgust, however, most of them were not able to find their names in the voters' list. They were stunned to learn that they were not qualified to vote for their chosen candidates. They're long-time consumers of the power cooperative. Some of them were able to vote in the last election for Pelco 2 director.
Someone from Pelco 2 said the consumers, about 300 of them, were only "consumers," not "consumer-members," and therefore not eligible to vote. They were told that they should have registered first as consumer-members and paid the P5 membership fee for them to qualify as voters.
But how in the world would the consumers know that they had to comply with the "requirement" if proper information campaign about it was not conducted? A simple attachment of a notice or information sheet on the consumers' monthly bills and an old jeep with public address system that went around the town's villages would have done the trick.
Resorting to limited or insufficient information dissemination is natural fuel to speculations that minimizing the number of eligible voters by disenfranchising the majority of consumers was an intentional move. Can you blame the distrusting folk who travel all the way from far-flung villages just to find out that they were barred from casting their important votes?
If Pelco 2 really planned to have a high turnout in the election for director in Porac, it could have initiated a simple yet massive information campaign on voters' registration and related concerns.
Aside from the considerable amount of compensation and privileges the position of Pelco 2 director entail, the winning candidate will also represent all the consumers, not just the "member-consumers," in the cooperative's board of directors. And since the director will have a say in the matters that affect the thousands of power consumers, he or she needs a mandate from the majority of the consumers in the town that he/she represents.
Perhaps townsfolk in Mabalacat, Lubao, Bacolor and Guagua should learn from the sad experience of Porac residents and be more vigilant in guarding their rights. Perhaps they need to have their membership "updated" if they want to participate in the election of their respective directors. Perhaps Pelco 2 also needs to re-assess its method of information dissemination, if it has one, in order to prevent intentional or unintentional disenfranchisement.
