SC TRO on voters’ biometrics to mean longer lines for vote machine, flying voters

MANILA, Philippines — The temporary restraining order (TRO) issued by the Supreme Court on the mandatory biometrics voter registration scheme, also known as “No Bio, No Boto” campaign, being implemented by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) will affect preparations for the 2016 polls.

“Obviously the TRO will materially affect our preparations for next year’s elections as it may result in the Comelec having to adjust the ‘project of precincts’ by about 2.5 million voters,” said Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez in a press briefing.

According to Jimenez, a project of precinct is the poll agency’s basic guide to determine how many voters there are going to be in every polling precinct.

“If you might potentially have to input 2.5 million voters into that obviously all of that will change, which will really have a cost in terms of time and ultimately in terms of the number of people who will be using per machine. One of the potential outcomes is that even the voter-to-vote counting machines ratio might suddenly expand,” Jimenez said.

The Comelec’s original projection is one vote counting machine (VCM) per 800 voters.

“But if we will include the 2.5 million voters who have no biometrics, it’s possible that we’ll be having one VCM per a thousand voters. The rise in the ratio is precisely because at this point this is the number of machines that we have,” Jimenez said, referring to the more than 90,000 VCMs that the Comelec would lease from technology provider Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM) Corp.

“Definitely, if the voter to VCM ratio will increase, there will be longer lines because there will be more people needing to vote with the same number of machines,” he added.

Jimenez also said that the inclusion of voters without biometrics might open doors for flying voters during the elections.

“One of the goals of requiring biometrics is to clean up the voters list. Kung 100 percent with biometrics tayo, the chance of having flying voters is very slim, almost none. But now, if we have 2.5 million without biometrics, that could be reminiscent of the past when we have ghost registrants, they can become ghost voters later on,” he said.

Biometrics data refer to the automated identification of an individual, particularly his or her photograph, fingerprint and signature, as captured by the Comelec’s Voter Registration Machine.

Jimenez said the Automated Fingerprint Identification System would allow the election body to cross-match biometric registrations of voters to eliminate double and multiple registrants in the voters list.  SFM