MANILA, 15 July 2003 — Absentee voters will have an edge over voters in the Philippines as they will not have to go through the long list of candidates for national and local positions that local voters will have to select from.
Thankfully this will be confined to a single page because penny-pinching Comelec Chairman Benjamin Abalos does not want to spend more than 400 million pesos to print the ballots.
Comelec estimated that the list will have about 200 names as so many politicians are expressing interest in the May 2004 elections, a Manila newspaper said.
Comelec has made it clear that it will limit the number of candidates from president down to municipal councilors to only as many as can be contained in an election ballot.
Abalos reportedly said: “We will limit the ballot to one page at all costs.”
In an earlier press conference, Abalos said he was apprehensive that with the simultaneous elections next year being computerized for the first time, the country’s multi-party system and relative liberality in allowing candidates to run on the local level will ultimately cost them an additional 400 million pesos in ballot printing costs.
Unlike before when ballots were blank sheets of paper with designated slots to fill out for specific elective positions, the 2004 ballot will contain sophisticated security codes to prevent cheating as well all the names of the candidates from which voters will mark down their choice.
Abalos explained that with at least four presidential and vice presidential candidates coming from four different political parties, each having 12 sets of senator-candidates, this would already translate to 56 slots.
Add to this 46 accredited party-list candidates and the figure this early easily breaches the 100 candidate-level.
The selection of a party-list representative for the overseas labor sector is the only thing that is certain to lengthen the absentee ballot since this early at least five parties have signified their intention to run under the party-list system.
Abalos said earlier each special ballot is worth around 10 pesos and thus printing a second page will double the cost.
“Not only will we double the cost (with so many candidates), we will also double the time of computing,” he said. The computerized counting machines to be imported from South Korea could reportedly count 40 ballot pages per minute or 12,000 in five hours, by which time the winner on the municipal level could be known.
