The Philippines’ Commission on Elections, or Comelec, continues to inch forward in getting voters’ biometric data registered in anticipation of the 2016 election. With only a few months left for voter registration, Comelec says that as of June there were about 3.8 million unregistered voters left.
That might sound like a lot, but roughly 50 million eligible voters have been signed up so far. Earlier this month, Comelec had pegged the number of unregistered voters somewhere around 4.3 million, and the commission’s chairman had suggested that he would be satisfied with getting half of those citizens signed up. Now, it looks like such a goal could be within reach.
Commenting on the recent progress, Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez suggested that increased public campaigning was “one of the biggest contributing factors”. Comelec had campaigned with a new slogan ‘No Bio, No Boto’ (which roughly translates to ‘No Biometrics, No Vote’) and had organized youth drives, mall partnerships, and celebrity endorsements on Twitter to help get the word out.
It’s worth asking the extent to which such a public and inclusive approach toward voter registration contributed to the relative lack of controversy about the new biometric voter authentication system. While there has been some concern voiced over the state’s collection of biometric data, it has been remarkably quiet given the scale of the operation, and a big part of that may have to do with Comelec’s approach.
Source: The Philippine Star
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July 24, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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