MANILA, 27 January 2003 — Should the over one million Filipino green card holders in the United States be allowed to vote in Philippine elections under the proposed absentee voting bill (AVB)?
This question is reportedly keeping the House and Senate version of the bill from being reconciled by the bicameral conference committee which has been holding marathon meetings for the past few weeks.
“My information is that there are two items left, first, the green card holders vote, because of the issue of their residence in the Philippines as required by the Constitution. The second issue is the sunset clause,” Senate President Franklin Drilon said.
Green card holders are Filipinos who have become American citizens. But a Filipino who goes to the United States of America does not automatically become a citizen there. He or she has to apply for this.
Data from the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) places at 58 percent the Filipinos who immigrated to the United States and have become US citizens.
Arab News sources said only wordsmiths are still working on the actual bill which will be signed by the bicameral conference committee on Tuesday for ratification by the Senate and the House of Representatives Wednesday.
Lawmakers expect President Gloria Arroyo to sign the bill into law before the end of the month.
The sources said that citing constitutional grounds, the House contingent to the bicameral conference panel did not want permanent Filipino residents abroad to vote.
This means that the AVB will allow only 4.67 million Filipinos to vote instead of its earlier estimate of 7.41 million.
This early, overseas Filipinos have been actively reminding lawmakers that a ban on immigrants and other permanent residents “will exclude virtually everyone of us here in the States.”
Marvin Bionat of the Boston-based Global Coalition for the Political Empowerment of Overseas Filipinos (Empower) and the International Coalition for Overseas Filipino Voting Rights (ICOFVR) said legislators should make a distinction between those who are naturalized American citizens and those who have kept their Filipino citizenship and have become legal residents elsewhere. Bionat complained.
He added “the absentee voting bill we have fought so hard for will be useless to virtually all of us here in the States!”
Over 70 percent of 2.74 million Filipinos who are classified as immigrants are permanent residents in the United States.
“Most of them in Congress say that granting overseas Filipinos the right to vote is the way to treat economic heroes—well, if 70 percent of all remittances come from the States, why are we in the States 100 percent disqualified? This could very well be the dumbest piece of legislation,” (if allowed to pass uncorrected), Bionat said.
Other overseas workers are raising a fuss about the possible exclusion and want to file a class action suit about the matter.
Bionat told them “we don’t want to have to go through the long legal route—if given a choice. The law has not been signed by the president yet. And they’re still supposed to “polish” the consolidated version next Tuesday, so we can’t give up this early.”
