MANILA, 28 October 2006 — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has again been asked to extend registration for overseas absentee voters in light of the Supreme Court ruling rejecting “people’s initiative” as a means toward charter change.
In a letter to Comelec Commissioner Florentino Tuason Jr., Susan Ople, head of the Blas F. Ople Policy Center and former labor undersecretary, said that previous to the ruling, overseas Filipinos were unsure that there would be elections next year.
“We have asked the Comelec to move back the deadline by at least two weeks,” Ople, the daughter of the late Foreign Affairs secretary Blas Ople, said in a radio interview on Thursday night. She explained that many Filipinos will likely want to register but may not meet the present Oct. 31 deadline.
But Tuason told Arab News that anymore extension is out of the question because “there are too many time lines that will be affected.”
The registration period was originally supposed to end on Aug. 31 but it was extended to Sept. 30 and later to Oct. 31.
“We will have to come up with the Certified List of Overseas Absentee Voters (CLOAV) by Jan. 15, 2007.” The CLOAV is the list of voters on a country per country and post by post basis. A separate list of seafarer-voters will also be prepared for purposes of the May 14, 2007 elections, he added.
“Registration activities do not stop on the actual registration itself,” Tuason said.
The Comelec will have to conduct hearings to determine the suitability of each registrant before he or she can be included in the CLOAV and also give the Comelec enough time “to prepare the National Registry of Overseas Absentee Voters (NROAV) which in simple terms is the mother list of overseas absentee voters.
After this, Tuason said the Comelec will have to prepare the ballot boxes and the ballots and make other preparations for the actual one-month voting period which will start on April 14, 2007.”
When the second extension was granted, Tuason hoped the two-month extension would be enough to reach the Comelec’s target of half a million overseas voters.
According to the OAV Secretariat at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), registration this year has reached 136,439. Combined with the 364,000 registrants during the 2004 elections, this makes more than half a million new voters who, enough to provide the “swing vote” in next year’s senatorial elections.
There may even be more registrants during these last few days of list up because during the last registration in 2003, the Comelec provided for a two-month period for the list-up but many registrants decided to wait until the last minute to queue for hours on end to sign up.
Of the total figure of 136,439, majority signed up even before leaving the country. Some 38,535 did so at the Comelec satellite registration center at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) while 46,723 signed up at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA). The two accounted for 63 percent of the total.
The rest of the registrants came from Asia Pacific countries (12,432 or 9 percent), Middle Eastern countries (19,005 or 14 percent), the United States and Canada (12,279 or 9 percent) and European countries (7,465 or 5 percent).
