MANILA, 12 September 2003 — Elections commissioner Florentino Tuason Jr. said Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman Benjamin Abalos was merely “misquoted” when a report came out that he was blaming non-government organizations (NGOs) for the low turnout of voters overseas.
“The chairman wouldn’t say such a thing. He knows better,” Tuason said at the Cooperation Dialogue on Overseas Absentee Voting held by the Center for Migrant Advocacy (CMA) and the Overseas Absentee Voting Secretariat (OAVS).
He then acknowledged the work of NGOs in promoting absentee voting registration and said that the Comelec has now allowed 110 field registration facilities.
OAVS Vice Chair Catherine Maceda said, “we have stretched the implementation of the law” with regards to this.
Technically, registration should only be done at Philippine embassy or consulate premises. These field registration services have been allowed by the Comelec (and the host countries involved) to conduct registration outside embassy or consulate premises.
Maceda said the field registration services allowed by Comelec resulted in teams being sent to Ireland (from London, England), Rotterdam (from The Hague), Bulgaria (from Bucharest in Romania), Winnipeg (from Toronto, Canada), Las Vegas (from Los Angeles, California), Jersey City (from New York), Wisconsin (from Chicago), East Timor (from Jakarta, Indonesia), Johor (from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), and Botswana (from Pretoria, South Africa).
She said gatherings of Filipinos have not been spared so that registration will be scheduled at least two churches, St. Anthony’s Church in Jerusalem and St. John’s Cathedral in Kuala Lumpur.
Meetings of Filipinos like barrio fiestas, and even the induction of officers of a Filipino group in Botswana in southern Africa, have been included.
According to Maceda, registration has not really been a failure because judging from the number of registrants every day and their 47 percent increase weekly, total registrants by Sept. 30 will be 400,087.
This will be almost half of earlier projections made by the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) given the restrictions legislators incorporated in the absentee voting law.
Maceda said during the bicameral deliberations on the absentee voting bill, she headed a team from the CFO which presented five scenarios and the corresponding expected number of registrants.
She said the final version of the law approximated the fifth scenario which would require personal registration and personal voting except in three countries, and the exclusion of immigrants except for the affidavit of intent to return.
In this scenario, the CFO team maintained that since only 30 percent of the overseas population resided or worked within a radius of 160 kilometers of the nearest Philippine embassy or consulate, a 100 percent turnout would translate to only 900,000. Latest figures from the OAVS showed that total registration had already hit 116,520 as of Sept. 9. Maceda said this figure had risen to 125,900 overnight. She said even the lowest possible number of registrants (195,507) would mean a registration that was 20 percent of the target.
