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By Anthony Vargas, Reporter
THE Commission on Elections (Comelec) on
Wednesday called on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to
participate in the forthcoming elections in the Autonomous Region in
Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
Comelec spokesman James Jimenez aired this call
after the MILF Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahin ordered all its 10,000
fighters to boycott the ARMM election this August.
“If that’s what they [MILF] want, that is
their right and we respect that, but for the Comelec we don’t
think it is a good idea,” Jimenez told reporters on Wednesday.
The Comelec spokesman said the call for boycott
by the MILF leaderships could be just part of a political strategy,
but the move might not augur well for the secessionist rebel group.
“Because they are not exercising their
democratic right to vote, for us, we hope that there would be
maximum participation on the part of the MILF,” said by Jimenez.
The ARMM election, which is scheduled on August
11, will be using modern election technology as a test-run for the
automation of the 2010 Presidential Election.
Election in Maguindanao will be using the Direct
Recording Electronic (DRE) technology while the rest of the region
will be using the Optical Mark Reader (OMR).
The filling of certificate of candidacies for
the positions of ARMM governor, vice governor and assembly has ended
on Wednesday.
The DRE system is a touch screen voting machine
where names of candidates are displayed and the voter will simply
key in the name of candidate that he chooses on the screen with his
vote being automatically counted.
Meanwhile, the OMR is a ballot counting machine
where the voter is given a ballot with names of candidate are
pre-printed with ovals for the voters to shade the names of the
candidates that he or she had chosen.
An OMR machine will then scan the votes or the
shaded ballots. The budget allocated for the ARMM elections is P867
million with P279 million for DRE and P125 million for the OMR.
The ARMM has an estimated 1.7 million registered
voters who are expected to elect a governor, a vice governor and 27
members of the ARMM’s Regional Legislative Assembly.
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