P2.8 B allocated for honoraria
Teachers should be prepaid for poll duties - Recto

Sen. Ralph Recto wants teachers and other deputized election officers pre-paid for their poll duties including the transport allowance given to them for bringing voting paraphernalia to the precincts.

With elections 11 days away, Recto said arrangements should be now going full blast in ensuring that money are sent to Department of Education field offices before Friday, May 11, the last working day before the May 14 polls.

When it comes to poll duties pay, teachers should be pre-paid, not post-paid. Or at least, they be paid half in advance, and the balance immediately after the elections. We shouldn't be sending them to battle without paying them first, he said.

Recto noted that there were complaints by teachers in the past of not having been paid their honorarium weeks if not a month after the elections have been held and winning candidates proclaimed.

Recto made the call as he noted that P3.3 billion of the P5.7 billion allocated by Congress under the 2007 budget for the midterm elections will be used for the per diem, allowances, wages and honoraria of election workers.

Of this amount, P2.79 billion will go to teachers honorarium, pegged at P1,000 a day for each of the three members of a precincts Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) for three days.

Thus, a teacher serving poll duties can receive as much as P3,000 in pay, Recto explained.

As in the past, the Comelec is relying on the countrys 510,150 public school teachers to man an estimated 310,000 precincts to which about 45 million voters will troop to cast their votes for national and local election posts.

The Comelec will be tapping other government employees for poll work as the number of needed BEI members exceeds the present number of teachers.

Recto said other personnel deputized by the Comelec should be pre-paid as well.

These include the 31,000 DepEd supervisors and officials who will be paid P1,000 a day each for overseeing 10 precincts.

As the process of tabulating votes are elevated to the municipal or city, and then to the provincial level, some P59 million will be earmarked to pay for the honoraria of members of the municipal, city, provincial Board of Canvassers.

Recto said teachers should also get in advance their fare money, for fetching ballots and other voting paraphernalia from town and city halls, bringing these to their stations, and returning these to the halls for canvassing.

He said the P100 originally earmarked as transport allowance for each precinct BEI member is not enough and should be augmented, which the Comelec can do as a fiscally autonomous body.