Comelec fears ‘flying voters’ with SC TRO on ‘no bio, no boto’

The suspension by the Supreme Court (SC) of the mandatory biometrics voter registration scheme could affect preparations for the 2016 polls and “might open the doors for ‘flying voters,’” the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said on Thursday.

“Obviously the TRO (temporary restraining order) will materially affect our preparations for next year’s elections as it may result in the Comelec having to adjust the project of precinct by about 2.5 million voters,” said Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez, reacting to the high court’s order to temporarily stop the “No Bio, No Boto” policy.

If the agency had to input 2.5 million voters into precinct voters lists, “that would really have a cost in terms of time and ultimately in terms of the number of people who will be using the voter machines,” Jimenez said. “Even the voter-to-counting machine ratio might suddenly expand,” Jimenez added.

The Comelec’s original projection was 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 thousand voters,” Jimenez said, referring to the more than 90,000 VCM’s that the Comelec will lease from technology provider Smartmatic-Total Information Management 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 warned 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. With biometrics, the chance of having flying voters is very slim, almost nil. 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 refers to the automated identification of an individual, particularly his or her photograph, fingerprint and signature, as captured by the Comelec’s voter registration machine.

He further explained that the automated fingerprint identification system allows the election body to crossmatch biometric registrations of voters to eliminate double and multiple registrants in the voters list.

Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III, chair of the Senate committee on electoral reforms and people’s participation, agreed that one of the aims of the biometrics policy was to weed out flying voters. If the high court should rule that the “No bio, No boto” policy is a violation of each citizen’s constitutional right to vote, the Comelec would revert back to the old voters list.

The Supreme Court gave the Comelec 10 days to answer the challenges to its biometrics policy filed by the Kabataan party-list group.