MANILA, 17 February 2004 — Overseas Filipinos are excited about exercising the right of suffrage, some of them for the first time come May despite the many problems that have hounded the implementation of the overseas absentee voting (OAV) law.
Marvin Bionat, Filipino community leader in Boston, Massachusetts, who has been abroad since 1988, said he was “quite excited” about his participation in the coming polls.
“It’s a modest start in terms of the number of enfranchised voters, but there’s no turning back now. Giving hundreds of thousands and ultimately (in succeeding elections) millions of overseas Filipinos their basic political right to vote is milestone, and having helped pass the bill makes this forthcoming May exercise truly meaningful for us,” Bionat said.
Bionat was one of the prominent advocates for the OAV law that was finally signed on Feb. 13, 2003.
At the start of the campaign for absentee voting, Bionat was with Joe Pascual, who he said started the first online group that campaigned for absentee voting but died before the bill was passed last year.
“He had been in the States for decades but refused to apply for American citizenship because he valued his Filipino citizenship and hoped to one day exercise his right to vote. Like many of us, he never really left the Philippines, reading online news sources every day to keep abreast of events and developments. I’ll be thinking of him when I cast my first absentee voting ballot,” Bionat said.
Others such as Daphne Ceniza who has lived in Hong Kong for more than 8 years, said the lack of choices for the country’s leaders has taken the excitement out of their right to suffrage come May.
“The candidates do not offer much promise. I hope that someday, somebody worthy of our trust will come into the horizon. There is so much lacking in the OAV law and we look forward to participating when they review it,” Ceniza said.
Mike Bolos, an OFW in Riyadh for the past 26 years, said the bill “left much to be desired and I am not very optimistic at this point that it will make much of a difference in the coming elections because of the limitations tucked into it by way of the registration and voting in person provisions.”
But he said OFWs should make the most of what is available. “I have to be happy with small mercies. I am happy that the OAV Law has been passed after 15 long years of struggle. I really hope that we can do something to revise the said provisions in the incoming Congress,” he said.
The OAV Secretariat at the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said all systems are now ready for the country’s first overseas absentee voting exercise. Voting for land-based workers is from April 11 to May 10 while that for sea-based workers is from March 11 to May 10.
Ballots to be used in the exercise were printed last Feb. 3 and are about to be sent overseas.
Unfortunately, lawyer Jane Valeza of the Comelec’s Committee on Overseas Absentee Voting Secretariat said not all overseas registrants will be issued voter IDs with pictures as had been promised.
She said the error was due to a failure in “biometrics,” although she assured the affected OAV voters that they could still participate in the May exercise if they present another form of identification, such as a passport.
