Here are some links just in case you would like to read more election-related news from the Cordillera boondocks.
Fun stuff: You see! All that coin tossing you did as a kid is valuable after all. To decide who between two candidates with the same number of votes would sit in the Bontoc municipal council, our favorite COMELEC officer Mary Umaming tossed a coin and Brian Bellang, who chose heads, won. Story by Desiree Caluza here.
Congratulations to Brian. Our condolence to the one who lost, Benjamin Ngeteg. This practice is, of course, provided by law but we still kinda feel sorry for Benjamin. Maybe our lawmakers can come up with a more equitable way of breaking ties like this. What about equal vote-getters splitting the term? Let’s give them each a chance to sit in the council (or in any other elective position).
Something weird is going on with Blogger/Blogspot because it no longer allows changes in previous posts, thus we can no longer add updates to the provincial results. Because of this, we are putting the most recent results from the Cordilleras here in a common post. These updates are courtesy of the bibaknets-yahoogroup forwarded to us by one of its members.
Incumbents Dominguez, Dalog win in Mt Province By Gina Dizon (visit their blog, the Northern Philippine Times)
Mountain Province has another three years of political leadership with incumbent 30-year congressman Victor Dominguez who won over his nephew, mayor Jupiter Dominguez by 5,609 votes and his relative, Engr. Arnulfo Pilando by 9,158 votes in the recent May 14 elections. All three candidates come from the municipality of Sabangan.
Note: We will continue to update the results as soon as we get new data. In the meantime, you might want to share your thoughts on the lighter side of Cordillera politics.
UPDATE 8: Technical problems with Blogger/Blogspot prevented us from adding updates to this post, so we posted the final results for Mt. Province here. Thanks for visiting this blog. We hope you continue to visit us in the future. Meanwhile, you might want to join us in our playful attempt to put words in the mouths of our politicians here. In case you are interested in more election-related news from the Cordilleras, we have some links for you here. Lastly, you might want to read our post in honor of our kailiyans who died working for a peaceful election here.
In one of our blog roundups, we linked to a new news blog, the Northern Philippine Times where you can find stories about the Cordilleras and the northern part of the country. A good friend, Gina Dizon, also writes stories and a column for said paper/blog. She also promised to contribute to our blog and this is her first contribution, a piece on Mt. Province congressional candidate Jupiter Dominguez.
Please note that this is not a blog endorsement for Mayor Dominguez. Gina, I think, likes him as a candidate and as a prospective Congressman. I, on the other hand, can’t get over the fact that he belongs to a political family that has controlled the province for about 30 years. And although he has proven himself to be a very capable mayor, I believe that much of the problems in our country can be traced to the fact that political power is in the hands of only a very few families. The more that political power is spread to more people, and not concentrated to a few political dynasties, the better off we will be as a nation.
You see! All that coin tossing you did as a kid is valuable after all. To decide who between two candidates with the same number of votes would sit in the Bontoc municipal council, our favorite COMELEC officer Mary Umaming tossed a coin and Brian Bellang, who chose heads, won. Story by Desiree Caluza here.
