Government officials, led by Gov. Juan N. Babauta, participated in yesterday\u2019s mock U.S. presidential elections in the CNMI.<\/p>\n
Northern Marianas College political science instructor Sam McPhetres said the governor arrived at the voting place\u2014the conference room of the Joeten-Kiyu Public Library\u2014at about 10am.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur high government officials, including members of the Judiciary, voted,\u201d he said, adding that majority of the voters were local senior citizens. <\/p>\n
As of 4pm, the mock election organizer\u2014McPhetres political science class\u2014registered some 300 voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll be happy with more,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
McPhetres said yesterday\u2019s event was for the students to get a hands-on experience of the democratic process and a general feel of the people\u2019s choice for the U.S. president.<\/p>\n
The Election Commission had authorized the students to use the CNMI official registry of voters for the mock event.<\/p>\n
NMC student Leslie Cabrera said most voters gave them positive feedback.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey said they like that we\u2019re doing it,\u201d she said, giving credit to McPhetres for encouraging them to go ahead with the project and \u201cthe wonderful job\u201d by her fellow students.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s wonderful. Our class made it happen,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Two classes of McPhetres\u2019 Political Science 110 – Principle of Democratic Institutions took part in the mock election.<\/p>\n
A week ago, the students held a mock presidential debate attended by Babauta representing President Bush, NMC faculty Danny Wyatt for Democratic candidate John Kerry, and Election Commission executive director Greg Sablan for independent candidate Ralph Nader.<\/p>\n
Yesterday\u2019s mock election was also carried out on Tinian and Rota. <\/p>\n
Election Commission staff Julie Villagomez had stayed with the election organizer as volunteer. <\/p>\n
The counting had yet to begin as the Saipan Tribune went to press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Government officials, led by Gov. Juan N. Babauta, participated in yesterday\u2019s mock U.S. presidential elections in the CNMI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}