May 14 polls: 1M file COCs

More than a million Filipinos have registered their candidacies for 600,000 positions in the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections on May 14.

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) could not yet release final figures because local election offices, which received the certificates of candidacies (COCs) over the eight-day filing period that ended on Saturday, have not yet submitted their reports.

But as of Friday, the Comelec had already received 1,070,991 COCs for both the barangay and youth council elections, the poll body’s spokesperson James Jimenez said.

Jimenez said the Comelec was still collating the figures for Saturday.

Fear eased

Out of the 1,070,991 COCs filed, 684,785 were for barangay positions while 386,206 were for positions in the Sangguniang Kabataan, or youth council.

There are 671,168 positions up for grabs in the May 14 manual polls, of which 335,584 are for the barangays and 335,584 are for the Sangguniang Kabataan.

The number of COCs received refuted the fear expressed by the National Youth Commission (NYC) that there was a lack of candidates for youth council positions.

For positions in the barangay, 82,582 were for barangay chair while 602,203 were for barangay kagawad, or councilors.

For positions in the Sangguniang Kabataan, 76,793 were for chair and 309,413 were for kagawad.

The NYC had asked the Comelec to extend the deadline for filing COCs, which was supposed to end on Friday.

Deadline decision

This prompted the Comelec en banc to meet on Friday and decide to extend the deadline by one day.

“The request was made prior to this data being available,” Jimenez said.

“The NYC was concerned that some places may not have any candidates in the Sangguniang Kabataan. I suppose that the request was meant as a preventive measure,” Jimenez added.

According to the data at hand on Friday, Jimenez said there were more male than female candidates.

There were more than 700,000 male candidates while only 358,888 were female, Jimenez said, adding that the final numbers for candidates would be released next week.