Comelec allows aid to farmers, fishers

Comelec Commissioner George Garcia. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has exempted from the election spending ban the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) subsidy programs for farmers and fisherfolk.

During a hearing of the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms on Wednesday, Comelec Commissioner George Garcia said the poll body approved the request “without any limitations or restrictions because we honestly believe that these are very important projects of the DA.”

To be covered by the exemption are P1.1 billion worth of fuel subsidies for corn farmers and fisherfolk as well as cash assistance for rice farmers and the procurement of farming equipment and machinery.

In the same hearing, the Comelec said it had taken measures to prevent poll fraud and that all preparations for the May 9 elections were on schedule. “We are sure that no cheating will happen in the elections,” Commissioner Marlon Casquejo told the committee. Concerns were raised earlier over the supposed leakage by a Smartmatic employee of documents related to the polls.

But Casquejo said the employee had limited access to election data and the incident had no connection to the May 9 polls.

Garcia, meanwhile, said the Comelec was on track as it had already started the shipping of all official ballots nationwide.

“We are [almost done with] the prepositioning of all other election paraphernalia such as the vote-counting machines (VCMs), the consolidation system [and] the batteries,” he said.

Garcia added that the training for teachers and technicians had also been completed and the Comelec had started verifying the voters’ lists.

According to him, the final testing and sealing of VCMs will be done on May 2-7. “This is a very, very important activity. Everybody should closely monitor. Poll watchers of all candidates should not only focus on Election Day, they should be required to be present during the final testing and sealing of machines,” Garcia said.

During this time, the VCMs would be initialized to ensure these were empty of data, particularly votes. The machines would also be checked to see if they could read the data in the ballots fed into them.

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