Thousands fail to beat voters’ list deadline

LEGAZPI CITY—Time ran out on thousands of would-be voters who tried to beat the deadline to register at Commission on Elections (Comelec) offices on the last day of the registration period that started more than a year ago.

In Albay alone, election officials estimated that at least 2,000 would-be voters failed to beat the deadline although they had fallen in line to register on the last day of the process on  Oct. 31.

Romeo Serrano, supervisor of the Comelec in Albay, said hundreds of would-be voters waited in long queues in the province’s 15 towns and three cities but the deadline expired on them.

Serrano said the would-be voters could no longer be accommodated because Comelec offices had to close at 5 p.m. on Oct. 31. The would-be voters arrived at 3 p.m., said Serrano.

The situation was the norm in most towns in Albay except in Jovellar where there was a low turnout of would-be voters, according to Serrano.

The enrollment of more people in the Comelec’s list of voters in Albay is expected to push the number of voters in the province past 700,000, he said.

1.5M voters

In Laguna, another vote-rich province, election officials said they expected to finish the final list of new voters by the end of November.

Dioscoro Pajutan, Comelec supervisor in Laguna, said officials expected the number of voters in Laguna to exceed 1.5 million as a result of the entry of new voters.

The Comelec has been using machines that determine voter identities through supposedly unalterable marks like fingerprints during the registration period.

In southern Mindanao, election officials said they were pushing for smaller precincts in terms of number of voters to speed up the voting process next year.

Wilfred Jay Balisado, Comelec regional director, said Comelec officials in the region had asked the Comelec en banc to approve their request as maintaining a large number of voters in clustered precincts could be cumbersome for voters, election officers manning the precincts, and the counting machines as well.

1,172 precincts

Balisado said in Davao City alone, there are a total of 1,172 clustered precincts based on 2010 data. Each precinct hosts at least 1,000 voters.

“Based on 2010 election data, many voters were not able to vote as a number of PCOS machines bogged down due to heavy use,” he said. PCOS, or precinct count optical scan, are the machines that were used in the country’s first automated elections in 2010.

Danilo Cullo, regional Comelec lawyer, said the number of voters in the region could swell following the marathon registration that ended on Oct. 31.

Cullo said in the case of Davao City alone, the Comelec expected the number of voters to increase to 1 million from the current 850,000.

“If the number of voters per clustered precinct is lowered to less than 1,000, this would also mean an increase in the number of PCOS machines that will be deployed to Davao region,” he said.

Although the registration process went on without a hitch in many areas, in Abra, two police officers have been removed from their posts after they were caught escorting would-be voters to registration centers on behalf of a powerful political clan.

Abra practice

In 2005, Malacañang replaced all police officers and soldiers assigned to Abra, a province notorious for political violence, with a joint security task force after a government fact-finding team found many law enforcers moonlighting as bodyguards for politicians.

Traces of this practice began to surface on Oct. 31, the last day for voters’ registration, when authorities caught PO3 Raymund Palope and PO2 Jithelo Tuazon escorting an undetermined number of people from La Paz town to Barangay Isit in Dolores town, where they were supposed to register as voters for the 2013 elections. With reports from Judy Quiros, Inquirer Mindanao, and Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon