Comelec jeopardizing clean elections in 2016

THE many hours millions of Filipino voters spent lining up at various Commission on Elections (Comelec) offices nationwide to have their biometrics taken turned out to be a big waste of time after Comelec chair Andres Bautista announced that the poll body would still use the old method of validating voters’ identities next year.

Bautista said a hard copy of the voters’ list would be used in the precincts during the 2016 polls. This means poll officials would literally have to open a big book of names to check whether a person is indeed registered as a voter and whether he or she is the same person in the voters’ list.