THE Baguio Character City Council(BCCC), Department of Education(DepEd), and the Commission on Elections Baguio is set to conduct a prayer rally this month to propagate an honest, orderly, peaceful elections (HOPE) for the coming May polls.
Baguio City Election Supervisor John Paul Martin explained the conduct of the prayer rally also seeks to encourage all running local candidates to commit for a clean, and issue based campaign.
“Although Baguio City have never had any election related violence in the how many elections held in the city, we would still want to instill specially for the first time youth voters, an electoral environment which is based on issues, aside from them not to adhere to vote buying,” Martin said.
The prayer rally is set at the Dominican Heritage Hill multi-purpose Hall at 9 a.m. of February 6 this year.
The Baguio-Benguet Ecumenical Group led by Reverend Abraham Luis is joined by various church denominations in Baguio and Benguet fostering a respect to the people’s rights, working for justice and peace, and dialogue of cultur3 and the Christian faith.
Aside from the Comelec, representatives coming from DepEd, Baguio Character City Council and the church are set to give a talk on its objective of having a clean, honest, orderly, and peaceful elections.
Comelec Baguio continues to conduct a voters education campaign in the City to inform votes on what comprises various styles of vote buying during the campaign and right before the conduct of the midterm elections in May next year.
The election lawyer earlier stressed despite previous initiatives to inform the duly registered voters of the city on the various forms of vote buying, the bad practice is still likely to be witnessed.
“It is for these reason why we came up with a multi-sectoral Anti-vote buying campaign to educate our voters of this negative practice and to encourage them to report such action to the Electoral Tribunal who will now offer a witness protection program for the voters to ensure their security,” Martin added.
From the 208,248 total registered voters of Baguio City in the recent Barangay and SK. elections, 120,723 voters casted their votes with 96,943 for the Barangay officials and 22,780 for the Sanguniang Kabataan.