JEDDAH, 28 September 2003 — The Pinoy’s tendency to wait for the deadline, known as the ma?ana habit, has reared its ugly form in long lines at registration centers for the Philippine absentee voting exercise.
With the Sept. 30 deadline getting closer and closer, Filipinos have started pouring in to the consulate in Jeddah, the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh and the embassy’s extension in Alkhobar.
On Friday, prospective absentee voters came in large numbers, along with their spouses and children that the consulate ground was overflowing.
In Riyadh, the turnout was so big that embassy personnel have to put up a table at the basketball court to accommodate the crowd.
At the end of the day, a total of 2,691 people registered in Jeddah, raising the cumulative total since Aug. 1 to 25,101.
In Riyadh, 3,022 registered on Friday and another 2,068 signed up in Alkhobar, for a grand total of 76,473.
Ambassador Bahnarim Guinomla personally supervised the registration in Alkhobar on Friday.
Despite the onrush of registrants, embassy and consulate officials were elated.
“We have prepared for that. In fact, we are encouraging those who have yet to register to come. The more registrants, the better,” Vice Consul Adrian Cruz of the embassy in Riyadh said in a telephone interview .
Cruz noted that Ambassador Guinomla’s directive for embassy personnel to work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. was precisely meant to deal with the expected “last-minute” surge in number of registrants.
Cruz said what made the happy was the evident enthusiasm displayed by the thousands of registrants.
On Friday, for instance, he told of two OFWs who bitterly complained that the lines were not moving and the process was disorderly.
Taking the cue, Cruz suggested that they put up a new table in the basketball court if the two OFWs would help. His challenge accepted, he took a table a chair to the court and under the heat of the sun, he started processing application forms.
After registering, the two whiners turned into happy volunteers, helping keep the lines in order.
The enthusiasm spilled over the next day. According to Cruz, as early as 8 a.m. yesterday, OFWs were already lining up outside of the embassy to register. Ambassador Guinomla invited them to join the embassy staff in singing the national anthem.
One of the OFWs who talked with Guinomla said that she was so “proud and it was a wonderful experience to singing, with fervor, the national anthem after all those years abroad.”
Vice Consul Jose V. Jacob, the acting principal officer at the consulate in Jeddah, yesterday said he was confident that the total number of registrants from the Western Region would hit 30,000.
With more than 100,000 OFWs already registered in the entire Kingdom, the Pinoy community in Saudi Arabia may yet have the biggest number of registrants worldwide. The Americas and the United States have shown the lowest turnout of registrants with only 7,224 as of Friday, according the OAVS.
Of the 7,224 voters in the Americas and the US, Saipan registered the most with 3,694 voters. In the areas where most Filipinos are concentrated, only 119 registered in Los Angeles, 736 in San Francisco and 68 in Honolulu.
Jacob urged community groups in the Western Region to continue encouraging or bringing registrants so that the Kingdom could pad its lead.
“We are making all our efforts to accommodate the influx and avoid further inconvenience to the registrants,” he said.
Atoy Esguerra of the Batangas Brotherhood International, one of the active community leaders in Jeddah, also urged those who are reluctant to register to remember that their votes in the May 2004 Philippine national elections could spell the difference.
“Let’s not waste our opportunity to select our national leaders. Remember, our votes could spell the difference,” he said.
Overseas Filipinos will be voting for the first time next year for the Philippine president, vice president, senator and party-list representatives.
Although this right had been enshrined in the Philippine Constitution of 1987, it was only this year that Congress enacted a law — the Overseas Absentee Voting Act or OAV — enabling that right to be exercised.
To be able to vote, however, an overseas Filipino has to register and time is already running out for the hundreds of thousands in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the world who have been holding on to their so-called “ma?ana” habit.
According to the OAV Secretariat in Manila, although there are an estimated 4.6 million overseas Filipinos who may be qualified to vote, they are targeting only half a million in view of the many problems that have discouraged many from registering.