The Commission on Elections said that over 150,000 public school teachers who are set to serve in the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections (BSKE) on December 1 will not be receiving the P2,000 honoraria as a result of the reduction of the proposed budget from P14 billion to P11 billion.
“We will again bring this up to our President that hopefully the P2,000 [honorarium] that was removed from our teachers can be restored here for the BSKE, because the work is almost the same,” Comelec chairperson George Garcia said.
He said teachers will also have to report as early as 4 a.m. to polling precincts on election day to accommodate senior citizens and persons with disabilities for early voting.
“Because we will still hold early voting, even if the Early Voting Law is not yet in place. Some 4.3 million of our fellow citizens benefited from those two hours of voting for the elderly and persons with disabilities,” Garcia said.
Teachers who served as poll workers in the May 12 midterm polls received an additional P2,000 honoraria.
Meanwhile, Garcia said Comelec has started the destruction of some 6.7 million ballots that were not used in the midterm elections.
In a press briefing before the start of the activity at the National Printing Office (NPO) in Quezon City yesterday, Comelec Commissioner Rey Bulay, head of the Committee on Ballot Printing, said a total of 6,763,649 official ballots are set to be destroyed through melting in a facility in Pampanga until the second week of June.
Aside from the unused ballots, the Comelec will also destroy 32,680 accountable forms.
“The first step would be, the personnel would manually tear the ballots and other election forms, and this process will take 10 days until it travels to the facility in Pampanga. That is the last step,” he said.
Bulay said the ballots will be torn “from top to bottom.”
“That’s the process. Everything will be torn here [in Quezon City], then collected, then taken to the facility [in Pampanga]. Basically, that’s the process, the whole thing will be livestreamed. This symbolic start of ours, it’s documented and will be placed in the archives of the Comelec,” he said.
Editor’s Note: This is an updated article. Originally posted with the headline “No honoraria for teachers in 2025 BSKE — Comelec.”
