MANILA, 10 May 2007 — A debate over the reliability of voting by mail has arisen after the Commission on Elections (Comelec) yesterday said almost 20 percent of ballots mailed to registered overseas absentee voters were returned because the addresses were no longer current.
In a phone interview, Florentino Tuason Jr., the commissioner in charge of overseas absentee voting (OAV), said at most 34,800 ballots have been marked “return to sender” (or RTS) and sent back to the Comelec.
This appeared to have validated the complaint of many members of Filipino communities abroad that the voters lists had not been updated since the registration for the maiden implementation of OAV for the 2004 presidential elections.
The loudest complaint came from Daphne Ceniza of the Center for Migrant Advocacy and the Filipino Community and Service Information Network (Filcomsin) in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong boasts of the highest registration of overseas absentee voters, but Ceniza said a lot of those who signed up for the 2004 elections have since transferred or resigned from their jobs overseas and are now at different addresses.
Francis Oca of Riyadh said the same held true in Saudi Arabia, which also had a high registration tally.
While Riyadh and Jeddah are in one country, those registered in Riyadh but have been transferred to Jeddah, and vice versa, could not vote in their new work site since the voters list of the two cities were separate, he said.
While admitting that the figure of returned ballots was big, Tuason said it was way below the 80 percent or 140,000 ballots that OAV election watchdog Kontra-Daya (Against Cheating) claimed to have been returned.
Maita Santiago, spokesperson of the Migrants Watch Network Against Electoral Fraud and Violence (MigrantsWatch.Net), raised the possibility of cheating through the RTS ballots, which the Comelec “ordered diverted to private couriers.”
She cited a letter by Tuason to the Philippine Postal Corp. (Philpost), ordering the use of private couriers for the RTS ballots.
In his letter to Muara Baghari-Regis, Philpost regional director, Tuason ordered that RTS ballots sent back to the Comelec Committee on OAV be resent to embassies and other consulates through private couriers.
But Tuason said this is intended to hasten the process of voting, not to cheat in the polls.
Lawyer Kabaitan Valmonte of the Comelec Committee on OAV said the courier would be able to send the RTS ballots to Philippine embassies and consulates faster than through the postal system.
She said the embassies have been instructed to try all possible means to search for the voter specified on the voting packet — television, churches, Filipino communities, among others.
Valmonte cited the case of Singapore, which has the biggest OAV by mail population at 26,000. She said 10,000 of these voters have returned to the Philippines for various reasons.
She said an estimated 3,000 of the 10,000 have moved to different addresses within Singapore. “Because of the efforts of the embassy, voters have been claiming their ballots at the embassy,” Valmonte explained.
But MigrantWatch.Net’s Santiago said voting by mail is prone to cheating.
“The OAV by mail is extremely prone to tampering. The fact that there are thousands of RTS ballots that will be diverted and resent through ‘private couriers’ heightens this likelihood,” Santiago said.
Voting by mail was expanded from three countries in 2004 to more than 60 countries this year. Comelec’s Tuason said this is so that it would more convenient for Filipinos overseas to vote.
Santiago said MigrantsWatch.Net has coordinators in various countries including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, and Italy.
