Ang Magiting - The Official Web Site of Rotary Club Makati North

Who said “there are no free lunches”?

The Week That Was
January 14, 2009

By: Dir. Chris Bellinger

Don Pabling celebrated his “sweet 16” birthday by generously providing lunch to an overflow crowd of Rotarians that included 15 former Presidents, former RCMN members, and several guests. To top it off, former President – Joe Reano – graciously shared with us some fine “reds” from his wine cave.

There were several committee announcements: Mac Mclean reported that the East River Children’s foundation received 560 toys at Christmas. He thanked members for their contributions. Past President Joe Reano announced the 4th golf fellowship that will be held on February 19 at the Villamor golf club. He also announced a golf fellowship on Friday, January 16.

President Klink congratulated past and present Presidents and members, for their attendance to honour our own Don Pabling on the occasion of his birthday. He encouraged more of them to attend the weekly meetings on Wednesday. He assured the Presidents that many of their excellent initiatives started under their leadership continued to be implemented under his Presidency. He made special mention of the Club’s support of Tanay Rizal Gawad Kalinga village. He also mentioned that RCMN had received close to Php 1 million pesos for the computer project in Pampanga, and was working to establish a library in Santa Cruz for which past president Jonny Carlos turned over a check to President Klink in the amount of over Php 21,000.

Our speaker for the day was PP Gus Lagman who made a presentation on the Automation of the Electoral Process in the Philippines. He said that the current electoral process in the country can take up to 20-40 days to obtain results and can easily be manipulated by politicians. Gus gave a number of examples of electoral fraud in the Philippines. He suggested one cure would be for the Philippines to implement a system that would require voters to dip their fingers in indelible ink as a sign that they had voted He said that this process has had remarkable results in other countries and gave those individuals who could show their ink stained fingers, a sense of pride to show to others that they had voted. Gus gave three reasons for supporting automation of the electoral system: (1) it would speed up the decision making process; (2) cheating could be eliminated; and (3) the election process would be transparent (i.e. the data would be available to anyone that would want it). While an automated voting system would yield almost immediate results to announce the winning candidates, the implementation of the system is potentially cost prohibitive (e.g. Php 20 billion, and some say Php 50 billion), it difficult to implement, and a technical challenge. All this said and done, the questions that the Government of the Philippines is asking itself , are probably no different than those being asked by the 50 U.S. states each time there is an election Perhaps the U.S. and other governments around the world can learn from the lessons of the Philippines in its strive to strengthen democracy.