There are only a little over three million eligible voters left who have not yet registered their biometric data with the Philippines’ Commission on Elections (Comelec), the agency has reported. Comelec has been pushing for several months to get as many voters registered as possible in anticipation of next year’s national election, which will rely on biometric voter authentication.
Speaking to reporters recently, Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista asserted that about 3.1 million of the 52 million registered voters still needed to register their biometric data. He offered his statistics in contrast to numbers from the Social Weather Station (SWS), which had suggested that 9.7 million voters had yet to be registered; Bautista explained that Comelec is “unsure as to how the SWS came out with their numbers.”
Comelec’s targets continue to narrow as the agency continues its push to register voters, first under the slogan “No Bio, No Boto” over the summer months and now with the somewhat more urgent phrase “Walang Forever”, which roughly means ‘nothing lasts forever‘. And Comelec has made some progress in its efforts, having evidently cut the number of unregistered voters down significantly from the estimated four million outstanding at the start of August.
To make the process more convenient, registration centers have been set up in the country’s popular malls, and Chairman Bautista told reporters that Comelec is also pushing to have polling centers themselves established in malls for next year’s election. “The voters are the main constituents of Comelec and we are here to try to make the voting process as convenient and comfortable as possible for our voters,” he said.
Source: The Philippine Star
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September 16, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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