With the October 31st deadline for voter registration looming as the Philippines prepares for next year’s national election, some of the country’s provinces are vying for bragging rights about how many voters’ biometrics they have collected. The collection of the biometric data is a major, ongoing project of the Commission on Elections, or Comelec, as next year’s election will rely on biometric polling.
Jessie Suarez, the election supervisor for Negros Occidental province, has come forward noting that the biometric data of only 3.61 percent of the province’s eligible voters remains outstanding, adding that most of those who haven’t registered have probably either passed away or moved to another jurisdiction. Zooming in to a municipal level, Bacolod City’s Comelec registrar, Mavil Majarucon-Sia, was recently in the news boasting that a mere two percent of that city’s eligible voters haven’t registered their biometric data.
The announcements appear designed to stimulate a sense of urgency – and perhaps regional pride – among voters who haven’t yet registered their biometric data. In seeking to prepare for such a large-scale biometric polling project, Comelec has gone to great lengths to communicate the registration process to citizens, first under the slogan ‘no bio, no boto‘ (no biometrics, no vote), and later under the more urgent mantra ‘walang forever‘, a reference to the fleeting time left to register.
Nationwide, there are still about 3.1 million voters left who have yet to register, or about 5.96 percent of the country’s 52 million eligible voters.
Source: Rappler
—
September 18, 2015 – by Alex Perala
Follow Us