Comelec undertakes cleansing of voters’ final list

BACOLOD CITY, Philippines – After the voters’ registration ended last week, the Comelec will start preparing the final voters’ list for the 2016 elections.

Comelec Commissioner Rowena Guanzon, who was in Negros Occidental yesterday, said the timeline of the poll body right now is “really very strict.”

Guanzon said the counting machines will be delivered soon. “We have to prepare the voters’ list. Our people have to prepare the template for the candidates. And then, the voters’ list will have to be encoded in a machine to configure,” she said.

This “no-bio, no-boto” is really part of the validation and “to cleanse the voters’ list and prevent ghost voters or double voters, and people who are already dead but are still on our voters’ list,” she said.

Guanzon said the Comelec still faces the same problem of Filipino voters who continue to prefer to register at the last minute. “For us it’s a good sign that people really want to vote but also it’s a behavior that we really should change.”

She said there will be a registration again before the barangay elections in October 2016. “The en banc will also have a validation of biometrics again for about 10 days.”

Guanzon said the Comelec has yet to collate all the data from different provinces and cities to determine the number of voters for the 2016 elections.

Negros Occidental, which has an estimated total of 1.6 million voters after last week’s registration, is the fourth vote-rich province in the country, after Cebu, Laguna and Cavite in that order.

Meanwhile, Guanzon clarified there is no prohibition yet on early campaigning of candidates because the campaign period has not yet begun. “There are a lot of advertisements, I hope (they are) not using government money,” she added. (FREEMAN)