OFWs Set to be Biggest Game Changer in 2016 Polls
MANILA: The 1.3-million overseas votes and the three million estimated votes of overseas Filipino workers’ families in the country may turn out to be the biggest game changer in the 2016 polls if presidential hopefuls also campaign abroad, John Leonard Monterona, OFW leader of Migrante based in the Middle East has said.
“We are asking the Commission on Elections to allow presidential candidates to campaign abroad, and issue guidelines on this. This is in-line with our aim to help educate overseas voters—to let them become informed and wise voters,” Monterona was quoted as saying by The Standard.
According to Monterona, his group and affiliated OFW organizations in the Middle East had launched its “Migrant Agenda” through a public forum as a challenge to presidential candidates.
“The forum aims to ventilate and popularize the various OFWs issues and concerns, and put these into specific program of action. We vow to conduct more in other areas in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council states where there are large concentration of OFWs,” Monterona, who is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, reportedly said.
“This will be part of our Voters’ Education campaign,” he added.
Monterona further shared that as last mid-September, “there are 540,000 registered overseas voters in the Middle East and Africas, the highest among the five continents,” the report said.
In Its first public forum dubbed “Presidentiables, kakasa ka ba?”, Migrante challenged all presidential candidates and their senatorial line-ups to discuss OFW-related issues, to include the “scrapping of all state exactions and exorbitant fees, directing services and assistance to migrants and their families, working for the protection of OFWs especially women migrants and minors, working for the protection of seafarers, stopping all forms of illegal recruitment and human trafficking, and repealing all anti-migrant laws and policies, among others.”
“We would like to see the Migrant agenda in the platform of government of presidential candidates and even those running for senators,” Monterona was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, Monterona was all praise for the Comelec Office of Overseas Voting chaired by Commissioner Arthur D. Lim who required all presidential candidates to issue their specific platform concerning specific issues of OFWs which will be posted on their websites, The Standard reported.