On LENTE’s plans for election day

The Legal Network for Truthful Elections (“LENTE”) has launched several initiatives with its partner organizations and monitoring projects to ensure Safe, Accountable, Transparent, and Inclusive elections this May 9, 2022. 

LENTE is among the Civil Society Organizations that were convened by the Commission on Human Rights (“CHR”) to take part in the Bantay Karapatan sa Halalan (“BKH”) which aims to utilize a human rights perspective in the monitoring of the 2022 National and Local Elections. BKH is the brainchild of former CHR Chairperson, Chito S. Gascon.   

In partnership with the Teachers’ Dignity Coalition (“TDC”), LENTE and TDC are launching a hotline that may be used by teachers to report their issues and concerns before, during and after the May 9 elections. This hotline partnership has been a staple service by the two organizations since the 2010 National and Local Elections.

More importantly, LENTE is proud to announce that it will be mobilizing over 4,000 volunteers from its 40 law school chapters nationwide on election day. Currently, these law school chapters are conducting pre-election monitoring activities such as public education activities, local debates/interviews/forums and providing legal services to the public and other CSOs. On election day, LENTE volunteers will do election monitoring and monitoring of vulnerable sectors’ voting. The monitoring will focus on the implementation of the election day guidelines with particular focus on the health and safety protocols, and the voting experience of  Persons with Disability, Older Persons, Indigenous Peoples, andPersons Deprived of Liberty voters. The results of these monitoring activities are towards strengthening and bolstering the advocacy activities and electoral reforms for the Vulnerable Sectors as well as help guide our recommendations to COMELEC and Congress for future electoral exercises.

Currently, LENTE is also lobbying COMELEC to approve its Pilot Voters’ Transportation project which aims to make voting accessible for the vulnerable sectors from Las Piñas, Ormoc, Zamboanga City, and Bukidnon. The project aims to provide transportation to voters from vulnerable groups from their place of residence to their voting centers so that they are able to vote freely on election day. 

LENTE also calls on COMELEC to make election information accessible to persons deprived of liberty by making the E-rallies of candidates live-streamed on COMELEC’s Facebook available to our PDL voters.  

In addition to these, LENTE is also conducting a focused election monitoring project in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (“BARMM”) to produce recommendations to further improve the Bangsamoro Electoral Code filed by the Minority bloc of the Parliament.

LENTE is also doing its 1st Media Monitoring Project that aims to enhance the legal framework on campaigning, to observe media coverage of candidates, and to undertake efforts on how to curb online misinformation and disinformation in elections.

Moreover, in collaboration with the COMELEC, Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), and Philippine National Police (PNP), LENTE plans to: (1) do reporting of vote-buying incidences with the anti-vote buying task force including electronic mode of transactions; and (2) mobilization of the National Secretariat, Law School Chapters, and other partners for the reporting.