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Wednesday, 25 November 2009 18:24 |
Bantay-Eleksyon 2010
PRESS STATEMENT
November 23, 2009
All credible, fair and free elections begin with a good and clean Voters’ List.
Bantay-Eleksyon 2010 believes that the COMELEC should be commended for delisting a number of the voters due to failure to vote in two elections and death, and for establishing satellite registration offices to reach more registrants.
However, the commendation should be qualified because COMELEC at the city and municipal level was only able to delist voters who died in the locality where they have registered; they lacked the mechanism to speedily obtain the list of voters who died outside these localities. Likewise, those who failed to vote in the two 2007 elections were only deactivated—which they need only to reactivate.
Bantay-Eleksyon 2010 observes that the biometrics system was only being used for new registrants and was not applied at all to old registrants (roughly one-half of all voters) whose biometric data had not yet been taken. This failure to cover all the voters renders the biometrics system useless in the present 2010 elections. Thus, anomalies in the voters list such as multiple registrants, flying voters, and ghost voters will not be addressed speedily and satisfactorily. Even the issuance of the voters ID is affected with a significant number with no ID at all.
The implementation of the satellite registration process in the universities and colleges has to be reviewed in relation to the low registration turn out in these satellite registration centers because of the issue on residency.
Bantay-Eleksyon 2010 observes that the recently concluded voter registration process was far from being trouble-free. Evidently, there was a scarcity of the data capturing machines (DCMs), forms and other equipment that would have helped speed up the process. The lack of proper training of some of the DCM operators and inefficiency of information dissemination contributed to the delay of the registration process.
The COMELEC should have anticipated all the possible scenarios in the conduct of the registration process and prepared a clear and effective contingency plan. In doing so, it could have managed well the entire registration process, including handling even the “last-minute habit” of election registration. As it is, a significant number of new voters were not able to register.
Bantay-Eleksyon 2010 notes the partisan intervention in the registration process. Politicians and their followers adopted some of the following strategies: spreading the wrong information about the registration process to confuse the people; mobilizing flying registrants to pad the voters list; distributing priority or VIP cards to their identified supporter-registrants for ease in queuing and to stall the registration of other registrants; and using violent means to prevent the people from registering. These activities constitute a violation of the principles of free and fair elections and undermine the essence of electoral democracy.
The failure to thoroughly cleanse the Voters’ List and the partisan interventions during the registration process will have their own effects in the integrity of the result of the Automated Election System for the 2010 National and Local Elections. The unreliable National Voters’ List, existing now for more than 12 years, could potentially be used by the cheaters to influence the election results and bypass the new system.
COMELEC did not heed the proposal made since three years ago to undertake a general registration of voters. It opted instead to stick with the continuing registration, relying on the biometrics system to clean the Voters’ List.
The burden of preventing the Voters List from being used for electoral fraud and of safeguarding the electoral process will be heavier now on the electoral watchdogs and citizen-voters.
Authenticated by:
Ramon Casiple
Chairperson,
Bantay-Eleksyon 2010 |
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