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By Bernice Camille V. Bauzon And Llanesca T.
Panti, Reporters
The head of the Commission on Elections (Comelec)
said Thursday that the manual system might still be used for
overseas absentee voters (OAV) as automation would apply only to
regions where there are a concentrated number of overseas Filipino
workers.
Comelec Chairman Jose Melo said automating all absentee voter
centers is “logistically impractical.”
“We can’t be sending the machines in places
that are too diverse and where only a few will vote,” Melo said in
Tagalog.
Behind target
As it stands, the Comelec is sticking to its
target of one million overseas absentee voters for the 2010
elections despite hitting only half, with OAV registration ending in
three months.
Comelec Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer, chairman
of the Committee on Overseas Abasentee Voting (COAV), said that the
number of roughly 503,000 thousand registered overseas Filipino
voters is likely to increase because of intensified operations in
Saudi Arabia and the establishment of a registration center at the
office of the Commission of the Filipinos Overseas (CFO) located at
Quirino Avenue corner Osmeña Highway in Manila.
“CFO Secretary Dante Ang told us that we are
yet to fully tap the Filipino community in Saudi, which is composed
of around 1.3 million Filipinos. If we get at least 50 percent of
them, we can easily make the target,” Ferrer said during the
signing of the memorandum of agreement between the Department of
Foreign Affairs-Overseas Absentee Voting Secretariat, the CFO and
the Comelec-COAV creating a registration center for Overseas
Absentee Voters at the CFO.
“We can make use of the schools there [Saudi
Arabia] so they [Filipinos] will be concentrated in one place,” he
added.
Ferrer further said, “With a registration
booth at the CFO office, Filipinos bound for abroad can register
first before leaving the country and just vote on Philippine post
nearest them come election time.”
Biometric data
Ferrer added that the CFO registration center
would have a data-capturing machine in place for taking the
biometric data of the registrants, which will include their full
contact details, pictures and signatures for identification. Their
voter’s identification (ID) card, however, will not be issued
immediately.
There are 92,175 new registered overseas
Filipino voters as of 3 p.m. of June 3,2009, with Filipinos from
Asia and the Pacific accounting for the most of the pack with
25,025. The Americas came in second with 19,345, followed by Middle
East and Africa with 15,524. Europe recorded 11, 698, while
registration centers at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in
Manila and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration had
7,934 and 12,649, respectively.
The posts that led in the most number of
registered Filipino voters include: Hong Kong (8,725); Los Angeles
(5, 827); Dubai (4,653); Singapore (4,091); London (3,864); Toronto
(3,095); New York (2,768); Riyadh (2,532); Washington (2,356) and
Tokyo (2,231).
Ferrer said his committee would be
concentrating first on encouraging the more than one million
Filipinos working in Saudi Arabia so they can achieve its target.
Precinct Count Optical Scan
As Hong Kong appears to have the largest
concentration of Filipino absentee voters in Asia, Melo said Comelec
could try piloting the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines
there.
Smartmatic, the winning bidder for the
multibillion automation project, must also be the one to provide the
PCOS machines that would be used in case an automated election would
be conducted for absentee voters.
Ferrer said that the 82,000 machines that would
be provided by the Smartmatic include the machines that would be
used in overseas voting centers.
“The company will not only provide the
machines, but also machine operators. We have to ask if they are
willing to do that,” he said, adding that the provisions regarding
the absentee voters were not included in the terms of reference of
the bidding procedure.
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