It is the day before the last day of the national voter’s registration. I am a victim of my own procrastination that was why I was standing in line in heat and sweat, aiming to change my city of registration so that I don’t have to go back to Pulilan, Bulacan to vote for the 2010 Presidential elections.

    I have resigned myself to a long wait and an hour or so of boredom. Eventually I got inside the Comelec office and confirmed that I was already registered in Bulacan and was only transferring precints. Anyway, there was nothing much to it: I showed them y driver’s license, told them I was married, gave my maiden name and voila! I was on given several forms to fill and was instructed to have my driver’s license photocopied and attached to my completed forms.

    As I was filling up my forms, I was wondering why I was supposed to fill up 4 forms when the instructions on the forms themselves stated that I was to fill up just 2 copies. I was bewildered, thinking maybe they’re just extras should I make any mistakes (shrug). Anyway, I did what I had to do and helped out some people struggling with their own forms. There was a certain degree of confusion among the registrants with that day. One primary cause of the confusion was in the current address part of the form. People are just unsure what to put in the boxes headed “Province”. Most of them wrote the name of the province they hailed from, whereas the right thing to put down was “National Capital Region”. The problem would have been easily solved if there was a filled-up sample form to serve as a guide. Alas, that would prove only wishful thinking, for a though there are 4×2 ft tarpaulin copies of filed up forms, none of them addressed the simply confusing issue of correctly filling up the address boxes.

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    After filling up two of my four forms, I stood in line again to file my documents for confirmation. It was then pointed out to me that I have to accomplish ALL FOUR FORMS. Well, it was my bad since I did not ask for specific instructions in filling up said forms, but then again, why print that applicant should accomplish only two copies? It was there on the first page! Maybe I was just oversimplifying things again.

    With that minor issue resolved, I went to file again and this time I was told to have my picture and thumb print taken. It took only about 15 to 20 minutes to go though the whole process of voter’s registration. I was just curious as to why people come back to “finish” the process? I even overheard someone that they have been coming here for the past two days with their registration never being completed. What was so complicated about it?

    Well, maybe because there are very few volunteers and so many registrants. They poor people as just overwhelmed by sheer volume. Another thing may be is the inefficient dissemination of relevant information for registrants. It would also have helped if some of the volunteers just had patience enough to walk those poor registrants step by step through filling out their forms. Of course, it will be annoyingly slow but at least you would keep the people from coming back and back again. It would be nice if something might be done about this in the next senatorial elections, so that I will not be finding lost kids, or get confused filling up forms.

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