MANILA, 6 October 2006 — Concern over the use of post office boxes instead of physical addresses in the Gulf prompted Philippine lawmakers to reject a proposal to allow absentee voting for Filipinos in the region.
“This is an old issue, but obviously the Comelec (Commission on Election) and Congress are not convinced that the postal systems there are just as efficient and secure as those in other countries,” Ellene Sana, executive director of the Center for Migrant Advocacy, told Arab News.
That means Filipinos in the Gulf who are qualified to vote in the next Philippine national elections in May 2007 would have to appear personally in authorized voting centers.
Acting on the clamor of overseas Filipinos for more flexibility, the Commission on Elections proposed amendments to the Overseas Absentee Voting (OAV) law so that registration and voting by mail would be expanded to cover other countries. Enacted in 2003, the measure allowed postal registration only in Britain, Japan and Canada during the 2004 Philippine presidential election.
In a hearing on the proposed amendments at the House of Representatives on Wednesday, Commission on Election (Comelec) official Florentino Tuason Jr. pushed again for a combination of voting by mail and in person to make life easier for Filipino overseas workers, or OFWs.
As proposed by Tuason’s Committee on Overseas Absentee Voting, OFW communities in countries showing a registration exceeding 20,000 should be allowed to vote by mail.
Filipinos in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates easily qualify under these criteria.
There are slightly more than 100,000 Filipinos in Saudi Arabia who are registered absentee voters, including around 96,000 who registered in 2003 and 7,940 in the current registration, which started last year. Saudi Arabia had the most number of OAV voters in the 2004 Philippine election, followed closely by Hong Kong.
Even then, Reps. Teddy Boy Locsin, chair of the House Committee on Suffrage, and Antonio Cuenco, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, want Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states excluded because of “unsecure addresses.” By this they meant the use of postal boxes as addresses instead of house numbers and street names, explained Sana.
Saudi Arabia this year began installing post office boxes at residences, but the use of PO boxes will likely be widespread for the foreseeable future, especially among guest workers who might prefer a post office box rather than an address linked to a specific residence.
Sana also said Comelec remained firm on personal registration “for purposes of capturing the OFW’s biometrics — photo, thumbprint and signature.”
As of yesterday, the number of new absentee voting registrants worldwide numbered 125,696, according to the OAV secretariat of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Added to the 364,000 who registered in 2003, the total number of registered voters abroad is close to half a million who will be voting in the 2007 senatorial elections.
The vote of OFWs worldwide would be enough to affect voting results, Tuason explained.
A substantial increase in the registration was noted when the Comelec agreed to extend the registration period by two months, until the end of October.
Comelec also proposed the widening of the scope of overseas absentee voting to allow participation in plebiscites and referendums. Under the present law, overseas voters can participate only in elections of the Philippine president, vice president, senators and party-list representatives.
Tuason said the voting period for regular elections would still be a maximum of one month, with the exception of established holidays in the Philippines and such other holidays in the host countries as approved by Comelec. Philippine officials plan to ask host countries to allow for more polling centers so that more OFWs could participate in the elections.
In Saudi Arabia, for instance, voting in 2004 was conducted only at the Philippine Embassy, a Filipino school in Riyadh, the consulate general in Jeddah and the International Philippine School in Alkhobar.
The officials noted, however, that the Saudi government had become more flexible during this year’s registration, allowing the exercise to be held in other places.
