Philippine Asian News Today Vol 20 No 15 | Page 4

HEADLINES  PHILIPPINE ASIAN NEWS TODAY August 1 - 20, 2018 MHHS members question integrity of board election The Multicultural Helping House Society (MHHS) has a new set of directors. Led by Tomas ‘Tatay Tom’ Av- endano, members of the board for 2018-2020 took their oaths of office in the absence of the usual fanfare that accompanies such event of the Vancouver organization. The board was elected on July 28 under circumstances that have been questioned by a number of MHHS members. One of these is accountant and former MHHS vice president Michael ‘Mike’ Cayetano. “Clearly, the constitutional provisions did not mean anything in this election,” Cayetano said. Cayetano and other members like Concepcion ‘Ching’ Colobong and Marius Alparaque have tried unsuccessfully to call for the post- ponement of the ballot to allow the organization to discuss and settle matters that have a direct impact on the integrity of the election. One issue of critical impor- tance they cited was that there was no corrected list of voters who are eligible to cast ballots as dictated by the MHHS constitution and by- laws. In fact, the group that super- vised the conduct of the election was operating with two lists of vot- ers, according to Cayetano. He said that there was a list of 65 voters with expired member- ships, and therefore are not mem- bers in good standing with the soci- ety per the MHHS constitution, and therefore cannot vote. This list of expired members is an MHHS-is- sued list representing ineligible vot- ers. And then there was another list of voters that contained all the names found in the list of expired memberships or the first list. Once again, this was an MHHS-issued list, according to Cayetano. This point was openly declared by Alparaqueat at the July 28 an- nual general meeting, and cited as one of the primary reasons why we needed t