THE PARISH Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), in partnership with the AMA Education System (AMAES), will be deploying more advanced technological systems to strengthen their poll watchdog duties this coming midterm elections.

PPCRV, the citizens’ arm of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) for the national and local elections in May, renewed its ties with AMAES on Monday through a memorandum of agreement (MoA) signing, making this their 4th partnership deal.

“We are delighted to again partner with AMAES in fulfilling our mandate as the citizens arm for responsible voter education, poll watching, and parallel quick count,” PPCRV Chairman Myla C. Villanueva said on Monday.

PPCRV Board Trustee William S. Yu said that the technology they will be using for this 2019 elections will be better.

“As we get better at running this exercise, we’re of course upgrading the system as well. One of the enhancements for 2019 is the machines we’re using with AMA are newer. We want the processing to be faster… because the validation is predominantly manual so it does take time to encode,” he said.

AMAES Chief Information Officer Edwin E. Santos said more efficient machines and systems will be used, especially in reporting incidents during the election period.

“(W)e will be rolling out an election reporting system. Aside from the election returns being reported by the team, (it) can also report other items not related to the election results like election violence, violations etc. or good things that are happening in certain areas… and it can be seen by the PPCRV command center,” Mr. Santos said.

The PPCRV officials also said that video conferencing facilities from the AMAES campuses and the software used for the school’s Blended Learning program will be vital for training PPCRV volunteers.

These will also be utilized in communicating operations of PPCRV nationwide.

AMAES President Felizardo R. Colambo said the institution’s role as the information technology partner of PPCRV “is a manifestation of our commitment to democracy as a whole. We keep telling people that democracy should not end in the election itself but more so in the participation.”

For his part, AMAES Founder and Chairman Amable R. Aguiluz said in a statement on Monday, “As educators, we highly believe in our civic duty to be part of ensuring that the electoral process remain clean and honest.” — Gillian M. Cortez

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