OFWs may lose right to vote

A petition from change.org posted word for word, let's push this petition!

"We see them at the airport every hour, every day. Men and women saying goodbye to weeping families.Each of the 100 million Filipinos has kin or friends who work and live abroad. Many of them work under harsh conditions. We call our Overseas Filipinos Bagong Bayani (New Heroes). They not only support entire clans; they prop up the national economy.

OFWs fought hard for 16 years to exercise their basic right to vote. In 2003, the Overseas Absentee Voting Act was passed in 2003. Data shows that 2.5 percent of the 10 to 12 million Filipinos abroad have since then voted in elections.

These gains are now in peril, warns a petition on Change.org that seeks the return of P89.6-million budget needed in 2015 for the proper implementation of overseas voting.

“The monumental project for massive political enfranchisement has clearly just started. We have generated the necessary momentum, and someone in the DBM deciding to delete the budget needed to register and set the stage for the 2016 presidential election brings that momentum to a screeching halt,” Overseas Filipinos say in their petition. “The decision is an unconscionable betrayal by a bureaucracy that’s glaringly insensitive to our desire to exercise our most basic human right to vote.”

The deleted budget is a tiny, tiny fraction of the Philippines’ trillion-peso national budget. But to the country’s Modern Heroes, this represents the exercise of their sacred right as citizens.

The budget process in Congress is drawing to a close but Overseas Filipinos believe that if you help them,by signing their petition, the budget for overseas voting can be returned to the national budget. There’s a very narrow window of opportunity. You can still make a difference by singing and sharing their petition.

Thanks,

Inday and Christine"