RIYADH, 11 June 2006 — Amid a poor turnout of overseas absentee voting registrants among Filipinos in the Kingdom, the Philippine Embassy has said it is renewing its effort to bring the registration process right to where the workers are.
Vice Consul Gerardo Abiog, who heads the OAV campaign in the Central and Eastern regions, said the embassy has sent letters to companies with big numbers of Filipino workers to allow the holding of OAV registration activities in the work place.
As of the weekend, the Riyadh National Hospital (RNH) has given a positive response and the embassy is still awaiting approval of its request to schedule the sign-up from 4-7 p.m., Abiog said.
He said the outreach registration effort has been sanctioned by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in Manila, which said it wants to make the process easier to encourage all overseas Filipinos to sign up and exercise their right to vote.
At the launch of the OAV law, Filipinos in Saudi Arabia posted the biggest number of registered voters with more than 93,000 signing up. But not all of those registered voted in the 2004 election, largely due to the difficulty of traveling from their place of work to the voting centers.
Around the world where there are an estimated 5 million Filipinos who are potential voters, only about 380,000 voted in the 2004 election.
Philippine officials in the Kingdom have expressed concern that the enthusiasm displayed by OFWs during the registration for the 2004 polls seemed to be missing this time.
Only 842 have registered so far in Riyadh and 1,070 in the Eastern Province. Of those registered in the Eastern Province, 500 are employees of Al-Suwaidi in Jubail.
Abiog hopes the number would drastically improve if the Al-Suwaidi example is replicated in other companies.
POEA Registration Center
One positive development about the OAV is the bigger number of OFWs signing up in the Philippines.
At the main office of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) in Ortigas, OFWs are encouraged to sign up while waiting for their PhilHealth, OWWA membership, and OEC documents to be processed.
According to the Comelec, the center registers an average of 200 OAV applicants during its 5-day-a-week registration.
“We have registered more than 17,000 since we started accepting OAV applicants here at the POEA building on Oct. 17, 2005,” Comelec official Ma. Juana Valeza told Arab News last month.
She also said that a similar registration center at the OWWA lounge of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport has registered thousands of OAV applicants since it was put up early this year.
Valeza noted that about hal of the registrants were bound for Middle East countries.
“Twenty-five percent of the registered OAV applicants were OFWs bound for South Korea, mostly factory workers,” Valeza said.
“What surprised us was the significant increase in the number of seafarer registrants. We have so far registered 1,489,” she added.
There were only about 2,000 seafarers who voted in the first OAV exercise. Valeza was also amazed that those who have registered so far were OFWs from 106 destinations including Chad, Cayman Island, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Azerbijian, and Sierra Leone.
Corazon Reyes, a hairdresser on vacation, has been working in Dubai for five years. She said the OAV registration center inside POEA building was a good idea because many OFWs do not have the time to register at the Philippine Embassy in the United Arab Emirates.
Reyes said it took her only 10 minutes to registered as an overseas absentee voter as against four hours to complete the processing of her PhilHealth, OWWA membership and overseas employment certificate.
