Officials with the Philippines’ Commission on Elections (or Comelec) are starting to target their messaging on a local level as they seek to register the biometric data of registered voters in anticipation of next year’s national election. Bacolod City’s Comelec registrar, Mavil Majarucon-Sia, has released figures indicating that only two percent of that municipality’s voters haven’t yet been registered.
That represents 6,342 of the city’s 260,146 eligible voters. Meanwhile, Comelec is still looking to complete the data for 1,232 additional voters; it isn’t clear if that is related to problems Comelec had encountered with data degradation, but in any case the agency should be able to target those voters specifically in its quest to complete its data set.
Despite these issues, Comelec has made remarkable progress in its drive to collect the biometric data of registered voters. Next year will see the country’s first election conducted with biometric voter authentication, and its election agency has gone to great lengths to ensure that the public is informed about the obligation to register their biometric data in advance, and to ensure that registration services are conveniently accessible. Celebrities have been enlisted to tweet about the campaign, for example, and registration centers have been opened in the country’s very popular shopping malls.
As the October 31st registration deadline inches closer, we can expect Comelec to push even harder to ensure that as many eligible voters are signed up as possible.
Source: CNN Philippines
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September 9, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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