As of April this year, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in Cebu recorded 2.5 million registrants for next year’s national elections in the entire province.
But provincial Comelec officer Lionel Castillano said a lot of work still lies ahead for them in the less than five months before the October 31 deadline for registration.
While they are still aggressively pursuing registration of new voters, Castillano said it’s not their priority at the moment.
“We are prioritizing registrants without biometrics data more than the new registrants because they would be disenfranchised come Election Day. Their names will be deactivated or taken out from the voters’ list,” he told reporters early this month.
Due to inadequate funds for information dissemination, Castillano said the office only relies on its personnel, as well as other volunteers, on the field to spread information on biometrics voter registration through word of mouth.
Inadequate budget
“We’ve even come to a point where election officers go to islands and mountains, risking their lives, just to get it across,” he said.
Castillano said they don’t have advertisements and they can only ask local government units (LGUs), their barangays and even teachers in order to reach out to registrants that lack biometrics data.
“The widest reaching medium is television and radio. We have television ads but they’re only shown on government channels. We need the help of our Manila office to ask broadcast stations to let people know,” he said.
Castillano said Republic Act No. 10367 or the mandatory biometrics voter registration seeks to cleanse the country’s voters’ list of multiple registrants which are prohibited by law.
Out of the current 2.5 million registrants in Cebu province, 5.87 percent of this or roughly 147,000 still have no biometrics data.
Still big
Though this number is significantly lower compared to 180,000 in January, Castillano said this figure is still “big.”
The local government unit with the highest percentage of registrants without biometrics data is Sibonga at 18.22 percent.
Trailing behind Sibonga are Mandaue City at 14.76 percent, Madridejos town at 14.28 percent, Catmon town at 13.12 percent, Toledo City at 11.83 percent, Poro (11.72%), San Francisco (10.3%), Oslob (9.09%), Minglanilla (7.97%), and Tudela (7.67%).
Comelec Resolution No. 9853 scheduled the filing of voter registration-related applications for the May 2016 elections from May 6 last year to October 31 this year.
The polling agency deployed satellite registration centers in various areas throughout the province to enable residents to fill up their applications.
Percentage
The fingerprint images of all registered voters are subjected to a computerized fingerprint-matching process using the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) in the Comelec central Office in Intramuros, Manila.
According to the Comelec website, the AFIS will identify multiple registrants which are prohibited by law.
Castillano said registrants usually flock to election offices starting in August and their numbers increase in October.
He said they can only hope that the percentage for the number of registrants without biometrics data will decrease.
He cited a city with one percent of its total voters still without biometrics data as of April and the problem it will potentially cause for Comelec.
“It’s one percent but that’s over 2,000 voters without biometrics data. Let’s just hope they don’t come on election day, looking for their names and finding they’re not there. Then, we’ll have another problem,” he said.
On election day, Castillano said, these voters look for their names on the voters’ list only to discover that it’s not there.
They always head to the Comelec office to complain, he said.