election post-mortem

In October last year, I applied to transfer my voting records from Las Pinas to Makati. The last time I voted was in the 2004 presidential elections, and having missed the next two elections in 2007 I was deactivated. The registration attempt took some seven hours.

Yesterday, I was one of the millions of Filipinos who trooped to their polling precincts to cast a vote in the historic national elections - historic in a sense that this is the first nationwide automated balloting involving the use of PCOS machines and shaded ballots.

I cast my vote on the fourth floor of Maximo Estrella Elementary School. I arrived there around 7:30 in the morning and oh my God the crowd was insane. It took me 30 minutes just to get to the stairs because of the people. This was how the corridor outside our clustered precinct looked like:

Absolutely no order here, sad to say. For my clustered precinct (No. 221, if anyone likes to know) people vote in room 403, but there's an adjacent room that serves as a "waiting room". Well, photo above is the non-queue into the waiting room, where people are served numbers. Then people are allowed to trickle into the voting room in groups of ten according to these numbers.

I stood outside the waiting room, unnumbered and sweaty, for THREE HOURS. It was an all-too narrow corridor obviously intended for smaller people a.k.a. elementary students. The lack of organization was insane, and I had to play it by ear and after a bit all of us in line were already sort of friends who were trying to (very loudly) shame people who were cutting into the line. It's like MRT Taft or North Ave minus the jangling coins in my pocket. Haha.

After a surge of discontent (LOL it really was) there was a commotion and all of a sudden I found myself being pushed into the room by a sea of swelling angry people. GREAT.

And then I had a number. VOILA! I was number 45. They were serving numbers 121-130 the last I heard. I never really got to verify up to what number the first round was, but I have a fair guess it went only up to 150 or 200 since it took only about a couple of hours or so before I actually got to vote.Here's a glimpse of the waiting room:

Having spent most of my life falling in line - for college subjects (Hi UP CRS, I remember you - no love lost haha), for the UP Fair, for license renewal, for NBI clearance, for registration transfer, at the supermarket, at the bank, etc etc., I am actually by now a lot more pleasant to queue with, regardless of whether I'm hungry or full. I remember being younger and impatient, and judging by how yesterday I managed to keep my humor despite the heat and the sweat and the fact that I was ALONE in a room full of people I didn't know, well it does look like I've somehow managed to grow up to be a rather patient woman. Hurray for me. (Thanks Dad, these genes are perhaps yours.)

So in effect I was in line from 7:30 in the morning, and I was able to finish voting at around 12:30. I was running on a mug of Nesvita (still off coffee, I'm afraid) and bits of graham crackers. I did a little dance on the inside when the PCOS machine did not reject my ballot on first try. Congratulations, indeed. (Incidentally, Aquino won in my precinct, and I just found out I was one of more than 500 people who voted there yesterday. FIVE HUNDRED PEOPLE. Kaya naman pala.)

Afterwards I went to the office because I wanted to watch ANC and monitor the Internet. Hehe. I ended up spending 12 more hours there, waiting for the Comelec results, the earlier of which they posted at 9 p.m. We waited for the midnight update, sent it to the editors and then went home. (Thanks, Lawrence for staying on as well :))

Last I heard, Comelec tally as of 7:47 a.m has Aquino ahead with 12.3 million votes and Estrada next with 7.8 million. Villar has 4.4 million while Teodoro has roughly 3.3 million.

They are going at lightning speed -- I remember it used to take days to cover as much precincts and they're now saying we'd have a new president by noon. Wow. I remember how in 2007 the ates stayed up late in the office for days waiting for Namfrel's midnight fax. Last night, we stayed late to wait for Comelec's midnight press con on ANC and Twitter updates from everywhere. Funny and amazing how the advancement of technology changes how things work.

I feel hopeful that things are about to be different - not because Aquino is winning, but because of the sheer dedication of the people who wanted to vote, people who actually cared. I was in line with a woman who was so vocal about telling off people who were cutting into line and was complaining out loud about the lack of organization (it really was a managerial mess, I know for a fact Filipinos are good followers and would gladly follow a system, had it been clearly in place at the very start) and at some point, she relayed to us later on, at some point some people from inside the polling place told her she can go ahead and cast her vote right away if that would shut her up. The woman declined the offer, saying she just wanted the line to be followed and that the point wasn't that she wanted to go first. She strikes me as a funny sort, the sort of kapitbahay you'd love to spend afternoons gossiping with about Agua Bendita (haha requisite mention), but right then she had my respect.

Meanwhile, the woman behind me also got offered a number by a senior citizen who did not need the number after all. She also declined the offer, saying it was unfair to the rest of the folks who were still in line waiting for their number as well. See, we're so used to people being assholes that we forget we are still in the midst of people who just want to do the right thing. I was this close to just bolting the line for fear of passing out because of the heat but being with such determined people tided me over five grueling hours of wait.

And that makes me hopeful. Never mind that a convicted plunderer and ousted former president is at number two, by virtue of some 7 million people who think he is fit enough to be put back in office. What matters is if Comelec estimates are right, 3 out of every 4 registered voters cast their votes yesterday. And that is something, isn't it?