The Comelec website ( comelec.gov.ph ) is still down. And with it, the Precinct Finder is also down.
More than 7 million voters in the presidential elections eleven days from now are first-time voters. They’ve never set foot inside a voting precinct.
They turned 18 years old in the period June, 2013 to October, 2015 and registered in that period for the first time. Thankfully there is a precinct-finder, thanklessly it is down. The Comelec chair said that the Comelec website will not be opened because “it is still unsafe” (“Comelec website still down, unsafe –Chairman”GMA News online, Apr. 27).
99.9 per cent of our students in the University are first-time voters. As part of our civic duty, i gave the optional assignment next week that they could use the first 15 minutes of classes to go online and locate their precinct thru the Precinct-Finder of the Comelec website.
A student said it was down, and another student asked, what if it’s down for the entire week, how will we locate our voting precinct? (he’s 18). And i gave a feeble: “your voting precinct is most probably in the schoolhouse nearest where you live…locate the nearest schoolhouse… through…uhmm, by using…google maps…”
And that’s my “WordPress Discovery Challenge: Obstacles” post — Comelec officials were traumatized by the hacking, the Comelec chair said the Comelec website was still unsafe, therefore they have not opened it, there is no Precinct-Finder, 7 million first-time voters will have to rely on…google maps… Waze… a compass… stargazers… wind vanes… crystal balls… tea leaves…
(they’ll probably ask their mom… but we want our students to be independent 🙂 )
As expected, PR agencies of the candidates flood the news pages a day or two after the debate with press releases on who “won” the debate.
More insidious however are “polls” hosted by news organizations that purport to measure who “won” the debate by soliciting votes from their viewers or readers. This is called an open-access poll or a crowd-sourced poll. It is not scientific, and everybody knows that.
Well, maybe not everybody.
Many people still believe what they see or read in the news. And many more do not know that for the right price, a candidate can contract a PR agency to activate 10,000 unique isp numbers in his/her favor to vote in a non-scientific poll, and get away with it. He/she “won the debate”!
Would it be too much to ask the editors to at least put a small, teeny box beside their sidebar “poll” that states: “non-scientific poll”. Two words, one line. Or: “Not a scientific poll.” Four words (three words and an article). Or: “This is not a scientific poll.” Or: “not scientific”. Or: “non-scientific”. One word. Would that be too much to ask?
Otherwise, post-debate “polls”, like the opinions of “political analysts” on who “won” the debate” are just pieces of propaganda materials to repair the shattered performances of their clients.
⇒ ⇒⇒ From Sheldon R. Gawiser, Ph.D. and G. Evans Witt of the National Council on Public Polls (U.S.):“The only polls that should be reported are “scientific” polls.xxx Unscientific pseudo-polls are widespread and sometimes entertaining, but they never provide the kind of information that belongs in a serious report. Examples include xxx call-in polls, man-on-the-street surveys, many Internet polls, shopping mall polls xxx “One major distinguishing difference between scientific and unscientific polls is who picks the respondents for the survey. In a scientific poll, the pollster identifies and seeks out the people to be interviewed. In an unscientific poll, the respondents usually “volunteer” their opinions, selecting themselves for the poll. “In scientific polls, the pollster uses a specific statistical method for picking respondents. In unscientific polls, the person picks himself to participate” (open access: open to everyone interested) xxx The method pollsters use to pick interviewees relies on the bedrock of mathematical reality: when the chance of selecting each person in the target population is known, then and only then do the results of the sample survey reflect the entire population. This is called a random sample or a probability sample. xxx” (at http://www.ncpp.org/ )
