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disturb me.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

the elections

i just got back from my namfrel volunteer stint in quezon city, and right now i'm parked here in front of the TV, watching abs-cbn's coverage of the elections.

anyway, from what i saw in my voting center, FPJ was leading by a lot. however, abs-cbn's operations center says that GMA is leading by less than 3000 votes. oh jeeeeez. i was so freaked by the results in my voting center... yech.

anyway, i just heard julius babao and his woman partner say that namfrel will be able to give the results by the end of the week because of the texting thing. guess what i was screaming at the TV? "HINDI NGA!!! PALPAK NGA!!! NOBODY GOT TO TEXT!!!" ayun... because that's precisely what happened, at least in my voting center. didn't get a chance to ask about the rest of quezon city when i got to ateneo at 530am. nde ko na naisip, i was just so tired. actually, i'm tired now.

but yun. apparently there was a shooting incident (to cause electrical failure, not to kill, at least) in marikina, and a lot of the voting centers' fuses blew because of overload. thank god that didn't happen to us. there were too few fans in trinity anyway...

i think i'll just write my first impressions of the elections as a volunteer right now. very rough, yes, but maybe i'll get them organized later. we'll see. i'm too lazy and too sleep-deprived to get them into any sensible order...

mau and i got assigned to the eight precincts of barangay damayang lagi which were "separated" from the rest. however, i think i prefer to use the term "segregated," cos it's kinda obvious na yung mga taga-rolling hills lang yung nag-vote there. sorry talaga for the criticism. but i guess it's ok because the covered courts at trinity were really crowded as it was. anyway, mau and i got separated from the rest of the group, and despite the fact that we had less precincts to take care of and there were less voters there, WE STILL FINISHED WAY LAST. can you believe that??? i'll not go into it. it's too painful for me, and for the other people too. let's just say that there was a slug in the garage who moved faster than those last two precincts. but i'm not one to judge--it's all relative, as they say. their job is really difficult, i know, and kind of a lot depends on those tally sheets. but so many of the others didn't take half as long!!!

and given that they all took so long, there were still so many errors, missing data, discrepancies, missing thumbprints and whatnot that you sometimes wonder what was going through their heads and if they even knew the procedures. and wait--should these tally sheets and election returns be deemed valid??? because we're pretty sure that they didn't include those other things in the other election returns (like the one that goes back to the comelec). and it would kind of defeat the purpose to invalidate those precincts.

but oh man... it was stress. everyone was stressed. i guess we weren't as stressed as the people who were actually counting the ballots (that's a whole different level of hell), but we were pretty stressed ourselves. and now i have a headache. ouch.

i hope i don't have to go in to the office today... :(

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