Lente Just Took Namfrel’s Part In The RMA Community
LENTE – Commission on Election (COMELEC) announced the replacement of Lente in Namfrel’s part in the Radom Manual Audit (RMA) committee.
The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections or NAMFREL is an organization of election watchdogs in the Philippines. The first election watch campaign in the country and probably the most famous as well.
Meanwhile, the Legal Network for Truthful Elections or LENTE is the first ever gathered network of volunteer lawyers from all over the country. Together with them, law students and paralegals are also trained and deployed to watch over the elections in the Philippines.
In a recent press briefing yesterday, Comelec Commissioner and head of RMA Luie Tito Guia announced Lente as the official replacement of Namfrel in the system of the RMA Committee.
Namfrel announced their withdrawal from their accreditation as ‘citizen arm’ in the Comelec following the rejection of their request by the Election body. They requested to be permitted to access open election data which could show primary election results in official polling precincts.
Guia explained that Namfrel is supposed to be the main convenor for this year, but they pulled out. He revealed this in his statement:
“In 2010 and 2012, the lead convenor was PPCRV (Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting) while in 2016 it was Namfrel. This year, it was supposed to be Namfrel again, but two weeks or less than two weeks before election day, they left us.”
After Namfrel’s withdrawal, Guia claimed that they began searching for other civil society groups to take Namfrel’s part in the committee and Lente responded.
This is according to an article from Philstar.
Executive director Rona Caritos of Lente said that they will be sending off 15 members and volunteers to help out in the Random Manual Auditing.
She also described the RMA process as a process to ensure the credibility of the elections.
She also said:
“They don’t need many people so that is one of the considerations and why Lente said ‘yes’. Number one qualification is we should be non-partisan and we are [non-partisan].”
That is all there is to it, at least for now. We’ll post updates as soon as we got them.
