Comelec sets deadline to resolve party-list groups’ case

(Editor’s Note: INQUIRER.net is reposting the article by the Philippine Daily Inquirer with some corrections and additional details.)

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Sunday floated the possibility of including all party-list organizations in the raffle to determine their order in the ballot in the absence of a final list of those that will be allowed to run in the 2016 balloting.

Election Commissioner Christian Robert Lim said the full commission has set an internal deadline to come up with a decision on which groups will be participating in the forthcoming elections this week.

“The worst-case scenario is that if we are not be able to resolve the issue by Dec. 1, all the party-list groups would be included in the raffle,” Lim told reporters in an interview.

The election body has set the raffle on Dec. 5. But the names of party-list groups that will eventually be barred from joining the upcoming polling, will not appear on the ballot. Their slot will also not reflect on the ballot, said Lim.

“For example, if party-list ‘A’ got the No. 1 slot but was eventually denied by the en banc, there will be no No.1 in the ballot. We will go straight to No. 2,” he explained.

The Comelec started the practice of holding a raffle to determine the order in which the names of competing party-list groups would appear on the ballot in 2013 to do away with the practice of groups including the letter “A” or number “1” in their names in order to get first mention on the ballot.

Earlier, Comelec Chair Andres Bautista announced that 100 out of 243 party-list groups that applied had been approved by the Comelec divisions to participate in the May 9 elections. Of this number, 78 were existing party-list organizations while the rest were new.

The 143 groups whose manifestation of intent to participate in the 2016 elections have been denied were given a chance to appeal the unfavorable decision issued by the Comelec divisions before the en banc.

The full commission hoped to render final decision on these appeals by Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Comelec hopes to come out with the official list of candidates for the May 2016 polls by Dec. 15.

The deadline for substitution of candidates is Dec. 10, “so that’s five days the commission has to work extra hard to complete the list, otherwise there will be a disruption of our timeline,” Lim said at an earlier briefing.

Interested bidders have until Dec. 9 to apply for eligibility to bid for the printing of an estimated six million pages of Election Day computerized voters list within a period of three months.

In its invitation to bid, the Comelec said the project had an approved contract price of P3,427,000.

“The bid price shall be on a per-page basis which shall not exceed 57 centavos inclusive of all costs for the hardware and software requirements, consumables and expendables, technical support and other incidental expenses related to the installation, maintenance and pullout of the provided printing equipment, except for the paper which shall be provided by the Comelec,” the invitation to bid read.

The printing shall be done at the information technology department of the Comelec from Jan. 11 to April 11. Jocelyn R. Uy and Tina G. Santos

Originally posted on 11/30/15, 12:34 AM.