Pre-Voters

Back in 2008, a young mother noticed her 14 year-old daughter watching the Presidential debates on television, holding a pen poised over her open notebook as though about to take notes. “What’s up, honey?” she asked her daughter. “I’m writing their points down so I can decide who to vote for,” the daughter replied with all […]

Wyrd Sisters

Imagine a world that seems vaguely familiar, with echoes of your own reality, but set in milieu that you know to be fantastic and fictional. Like your own world, there’s a lot to laugh about, interrupted occasionally by a jarring bit of keen insight into how things work and why things are the way they are. […]

Social Media and Waking the Voter Up

Social media is a powerful tool for waking voters up. It’s persistent – the messages you put out on social media are always available to read, watch, and listen to again and again; it’s pervasive – it gives you a direct path to the voter’s eyeballs and ears, via their smartphones; and it’s dirt cheap […]

Accountability and the Woke Voter

Traditional voter education teaches us that voters have rights. As a part of the electorate, citizens have the right to free and fair elections, to have the secrecy of their ballots protected, and for voters running for office, to have free and equal access to government resources. All of that is true, of course, and […]

ROTC

Glad to hear that they’re bringing ROTC training back – ROTC being the Reserve Officer Training Corps. When I was in college, it wasn’t called ROTC, but Citizen’s Military Training, or CMT. I was a Technical Sergeant in the UST Golden Corps; more specifically, the Special Forces. Yeah, I get a laugh out of remembering […]

Hottest

After she was featured on British GQ’s Hottest Women of the Week @PiaWurtzbach today got her own spotlight, as the magazine’s Hottest Woman of the Day. The gorgeous @PiaWurtzbach is our #HottestWomanOfTheDay. https://t.co/BiKzcTz7bn pic.twitter.com/nWVXdobPVq— British GQ (@BritishGQ) February 9, 2017 And she is gorgeous, isn’t she? But even more than her physical beauty, man, this woman […]

Narrative and the Woke Voter

How do you differentiate one candidate from another? Everybody complains that politicians are “all alike.” And they’re not completely wrong. One of the hallmarks of Philippine politics seems to be how remarkably alike each political party defines itself and its mission to be. This has made switching parties too easy, leaving voters with no practical […]

What is a Spokesperson

When I first joined the Commission on Elections as the Assistant Director for Education and Information, there was no officially designated spokesperson. By default, it was the Director for Education and Information that took on that role, but for the most part, anyone of sufficient rank was considered to be able to speak for the […]

Round chapatis

In the 2002 movie “Bend it like Beckham,” the female protagonist Jess gets told off by her mom for neglecting her Indian heritage. It’s hilarious. “What family would want a daughter-in-law who can run around kicking football all day but can’t make round chapatis?” the mother says, in frustration. Ever since – naturally – I’ve […]