Voters population in Cebu drops, says Comelec
CEBU CITY, Philippines—The population of voters in Cebu province has dropped to 2.9 million individuals as voters registration and reactivation period ended last Monday, September 30, 2019.
Based on the consolidated number of registrants obtained by CDN Digital from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) Provincial Office, the two-month registration accommodated 148,115 applications.
However, only 128,702 of the number can be considered as an addition to the voting population, since the over 20,000 applications were only for transfer within the province, and corrections or change of data entries in their registrations.
The number of new voters is not sufficient to offset, however, those voters that have been deleted from the records of the Comelec for failing to vote twice, death, multiple entries and transfer of registration to other province.
Last August, the Comelec deleted 295,922 voters for failing to vote twice, 4,783 who have been verified dead by local civil registrars, 135 multiple registration records and 13,269 person who transferred their voters registration outside the province.
This leaves the province with only 2,910,398 voters.
In the May 2019 polls, Cebu was the most vote rich province with 3,082,621 voters, including that of the cities of Cebu and Lapu-Lapu, which are independent or not required to vote for provincial positions.
Despite the lower voters population, Cebu Provincial Election Supervisor lawyer Lionel Marco Castillano earlier said that Cebu may still be the most vote-rich province as Cavite, the provice having the second most number of voters, only has 2.1 million voters as of May 2019.
Castillano also said that it is up for the Comelec en banc to decide if there will be another round of voters registration, considering the looming postponement of the 2020 Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections.
On Monday, September 30, the Senate passed in third and final reading Senate Bill no. 1043 which seeks to postpone the barangay and SK polls to December 2022.
The measure now awaits the signature of President Rodrigo Duterte, who called for the postpone during his State of the Nation Address (Sona) last July. /bmjo
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