Comelec: Voters’ list needs cleansing

The dead and animals can once again cast their vote if the existing voters’ list will be used in the 2007 elections.

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) yesterday said double registrants continue to plague the poll body’s list of registered and qualified voters.

"Although we were able to delist 130,000 double registrants during the 2004 elections, we still need to continue our program to cleanse the voters’ list," Comelec Commissioner Mehol Sadain said.

Sadain said the Comelec had to suspend its purge of the voters’ list because the poll body lacked the equipment. He added that the Comelec also had to focus its efforts on registering new voters.

Now, the Comelec will turn again to the task of purging the voters’ list, once Congress approves the purchase of additional data capturing machines, he said.

"We need additional data-capturing machines for the purging of the voters’ list in preparation for the 2007 electoral exercise," Sadain said.

The Comelec earlier urged Congress to allow the poll body to purchase "matching equipment" to help them weed out double registrants.

"We need the matching equipment so that our data-capturing machines would not be put to waste," Sadain explained. "Without (the matching equipment), our program to computerize the voters’ list would be useless."

The Comelec is pushing for the modernization of the electoral system to minimize or eliminate cheating and other forms of electoral fraud.

With this goal, the Comelec is asking Congress to amend Republic Act No. 8046 and synchronize its amendments with emerging elections technology.

RA 8046 was passed into law on June 7, 1995 and in it is contained the Comelec’s mandate to "conduct a nationwide demonstration of a computerized election system and pilot-test it in the 1996 elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM)."

Under RA 8046, the Comelec was tasked with pilot-testing automated counting machines (ACMs), memory pack or diskettes, memory pack receivers and computerized tape printouts for the ARMM elections.

At the time the law was passed, such computerized vote-counting equipment was state-of-the-art. Now, because of the quick evolution of computer technology, these machines are practically obsolete. — Mayen Jaymalin