MANILA, 15 September 2006 — A top official of the Philippine Commission on Elections (Comelec) said the registration for overseas absentee voters (OAV) has been extended to Oct. 31 to give those who have failed to register to sign up.
The Comelec’s commissioners are already preparing the resolution to formalize what they have approved during a meeting on Wednesday, said Commissioner Florentino Tuason, who heads the OAV program.
Tuason said the Comelec’s action was in response to requests by Filipinos in the United States, notably business leader Loida Nicolas-Lewis, who said the extension would give dual citizens more time to exercise their right of suffrage.
Nicolas-Lewis had argued that the Philippine Supreme Court only recently came out with a ruling doing away with the requirement for OAV registrants to submit an affidavit expressing their intent to return to the Philippines.
As of Sept. 12, less than half a million overseas Filipinos had registered to vote in the coming 2007 mid-term elections.
Generoso Calonge, vice chairman of the OAV Secretariat at the Department of Foreign Affairs OAVS) said this included 117,113 new registrants and the less than 400,000 who registered for the 2004 polls.
In Saudi Arabia, OAVS figures placed the new registrants at 6,639, with a dismal 168 having signed up in the first 12 days of September. The registration period was to end on Sept. 30 after having been extended for thirty days.
Worldwide, the figure also showed a marked improvement from the 4,730 total registrants by the end of July.
The registrants at the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh since September 2005 reached 3,029, which was 46 percent of the total voter registration in the Kingdom. Some 2,017, 30 percent of the total, registered with the Philippine Consulate in Jeddah, while 1,593 (24 percent) signed up in Alkhobar.
Registrants in Saudi Arabia made up 41 percent of the 16,294 new registrants in the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates had the second highest number of registrants at 5,054, followed by Abuja in Nigeria at 1,016.
Officials were hoping that the number of registrants worldwide would again shoot up in the last days of the registration period.
Procrastination (mamaya na) is consi-dered by sociologists as a common Filipino trait. Economists and businessmen say it contributes immensely to the poor state of the country’s economic affairs.
In Hong Kong alone, more than half of the new registrants signed up during August and September. The same pattern was seen during the first list-up when scores of registrants queued to register during the last few days of registration.
However, the registration figures fell way below the one million target set by the Comelec in order to justify the continuation of the exercise.
Local non-governmental organizations had recommended after the 2004 elections that preparations should be made by the all government agencies concerned to amend the OAVL and thus enable more OFWs to register.
