Kabataan Party-list Rep. Mong Palatino today commended the Commission on Elections for passing resolutions allowing employees to “go on official time when filing applications for voters’ registration.”
Comelec recently passed Resolutions 8668 and 8669, requesting the Civil Service Commission for government employees and the Department of Labor and Employment for private employees, respectively, to issue ‘appropriate orders, guidelines and/or circulars urging their employees to file their applications for voters’ registration’.
Palatino regards these resolutions as a positive development to House Resolution 1336 which he authored asking for the implementation of a ‘one-day …

To: Commision on Elections (Comelec)
From: Kabataan Partylist
Re: Petition Moving for Comelec to Extend Registration for First Time Voters from October 2009 to Original Deadline of December 2009.
To the Honorable Commissioners:
In every election, various political candidates of all shades have tried to court the youth vote. US Pres. Barack Obama’s victory, for instance, was clinched largely by the massive endorsement of American voters under the age of 25. In the Philippines, past elections and statistics have proven that just half of the so-called youth vote can seal a seat for an …

Youth to register 1M new voices for change
Extend voters’ registration, Comelec told
Around 1,000 first-time voters from different parts of the country registered for next year’s polls, vowed to serve as poll watchers, and act for change beyond the 2010 elections.
Two months before the Commission on Elections’ deadline of voters’ registration, new voters from Metro Manila, Baguio, Laguna, Quezon, Bicol, Davao and Cebu registered as part of Kabataan Party-list’s Isang Milyon, Isang Panata (1M, 1P) campaign, which aims to engage the youth to help out in encouraging one million new registrants …

Says Comelec ‘way off target’, renews calls for extension of deadline
Kabataan Party-list Rep. Mong Palatino today urged the Commission on Elections to step up its efforts in encouraging more youth and first-time voters to register for the 2010 elections by conducting “more available and accessible satellite registrations” in schools, barangays and communities.
Palatino said that the Comelec is disturbingly ‘way off target’, citing the agency’s data that as of latest, only 841,200 new voters have registered. “This is a far cry from Comelec’s 3 million target come deadline, and even still …

Kabataan Party-list Rep. Mong Palatino today warned of a potential ‘cyber-Garci’ as the Commission on Elections (Comelec) finally inked the deal for poll automation in 2010 with partners Smartmatic-TIM.
Palatino said that until Comelec ‘makes public all terms involving the Smartmatic-TIM deal and unless it practices full transparency with regard to the processes, system and implementing rules and guidelines of automation, it will not be able to waylay the public’s apprehension with poll automation.’
“After all the brouhaha and apparent mismanagement, Comelec now owes it to the public to at least have …

Kabataan Party-list Representative Mong Palatino today said that the modernization of elections alone through poll automation may not solve the longstanding problem of election fraud.
“Using technology as a quick fix for the array of problems that have hounded our polls will not automatically solve electoral fraud and other problems. There are more fundamental issues to address and yet the Commission on Elections seems to be caught up in something that it might not just be fully prepared for ,” Palatino said.
Citing experiences from other countries, Palatino said that developed countries …