Good news

While there were a lot of dismal things that happened like people in the queue for more than three hours, allegations of possible hacking, failure of elections—voila, we did it! The Philippines had a President in less than 24 hours. Back in college while I was doing my undergraduate research, I tracked ICT for development initiatives. From the looks of it, our automated elections is one of the most successful in the world. A number of countries that used automated elections for the first time resulted in failure of elections. I am so glad to note that in less than 24 hours the country had a President although the proclamation came in much later because of some complaints of irregularities which is a classic in the history of national elections worldwide. I am so pleased that this year’s election is the most peaceful we have ever conducted. I could just recall many election officials including public school teachers lost their lives before while performing their duties. I could exactly recall how I started to lose faith in our democratic process when as the manual counting starts, there would be brownouts, presence of goons around the precincts. We have experienced all that. Gladly, we’re over them.

Reflecting on the process, I am so proud that our national media had been very vigilant in making sure that our election would be successful. I appreciated the fact that they made the public aware to the littlest details of what was going on. No wonder we have the freest media in the world. Sometimes OA, but they did a good job this time. I am just very glad as to how the process went. We have just proven the pessimists wrong. I trust that this success could translate to people having their faith back to our democratic process. I hope that the success of national elections could translate to something more—people realising their role in nation building, people becoming active participants in development. I will pray for that.

God bless the Philippines!