Congress told to decide on SK

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chair Sixto Brillantes Jr. on Friday urged Congress to decide within the next few weeks whether to postpone the Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections in October.

Brillantes said Congress should immediately act on proposals to postpone the elections because the Comelec would start printing the ballots by the third week of September.

“The printing is set for the third week of September … so by that time we should know if (the SK elections) are going to be postponed or not,” Brillantes said in an interview.

He urged the President to certify as urgent the pending bills to postpone the elections so that his allies in Congress could act on them.

“If these are not certified by the President, there won’t be enough time. The President has to certify this within the next five days or up to next week,” Brillantes said.

He said the final listing of registered voters would be out by the end of the month despite the unruly scenes at Comelec offices on Wednesday, the last day of the 10-day special registration period.

“There were those who asked why we did not extend it. Why should we when there were already too many registrants?” Brillantes said.

“If we had extended it even for a day, then our election offices would have been deluged by more people. It wouldn’t end,” he added.

Brillantes said that the Comelec was already using its automated fingerprint identification system to weed out those who may have illegally registered from July 22 to 31.

“We know that many of then were herded, or were double registrants, transferees or flying voters,” he said.