MANILA, 12 May 2007 — Shifting labor migration and “lack of interest” were pinpointed yesterday as reasons for the dismal turnout of participants in the Philippine overseas absentee voting (OAV) exercise.
Officials yesterday said only 54,316 ballots had been cast in voting centers worldwide with just three days left in the month-long OAV period.
Undersecretary Rafael Seguis, chairman of the Department of Foreign Affairs’ OAV Secretariat, said they were still expecting an upsurge of votes from the Middle East during the weekend.
“We are expecting a heavy turnout today, a Friday and a holiday in the Middle East — in Riyadh, Jeddah, Alkhobar in Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf area in Kuwait, Oman, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. Tomorrow and Sunday, we will have more voters from Hong Kong and Singapore,” Seguis said in a press conference in Manila.
Still, he said the realistic target this time is about 70,000 votes, or 14 percent of 504,110, the total number of registered overseas voters.
The new target is less than a third of the 233,000 overseas Filipinos who voted in the 2004 presidential elections. It is about half of the 138,000 of overseas Filipinos who registered for this year’s polls.
Lawyer Kabaitan Valmonte of the Commission on Elections’ Committee on Overseas Absentee Voting attributed that poor turnout to voters’ lack of interest because the exercise is not a presidential election.
She told Arab News that in some far flung posts in Europe, the voters did not even know who the candidates were.
In this midterm election, which will be held on May 14 in the Philippines, overseas absentee voters can only elect candidates for the 12 Senate seats at stake and one party-list seat in the House of Representatives.
Apart from the “general disinterest” by voters, Seguis said, the shifting migration of overseas Filipino workers is a major factor in the dismal voter turnout.
“The mobile nature of our overseas workers is a major reason for the low turnout. Many of the returned ballots indicate that they may have moved and changed employment,” he said.
Earlier, Election Commissioner Florentino Tuason Jr., in charge of the OAV, said at most 34,800 ballots have been marked “return to sender.”
Valmonte said that during the registration period, those who had transferred or returned to the Philippines were given a chance to change the data on their previous registration forms.
“If there was no request to change address, then that information became wrong,” Valmonte said.
She added that changing their registration is apparently “the least of their (labor migrants) priorities” when changing jobs.
Still, Seguis said that after the polls, they will try to determine what went wrong.
“Was it voting by mail? Was it the type of elections?” he said.
“We’ve done everything we could to encourage our countrymen to exercise their right to suffrage. We’ve gone to churches, supermarkets, and anywhere where Filipinos congregate overseas. We’ve gone practically house-to-house to tell them about the elections.”
After the polling precincts close at 3 p.m. on Monday, Philippine time, Seguis said the counting and canvassing will start right away as provided by law, regardless of the time in the country where the counting takes place.
Foreign affairs spokesman Claro Cristobal said in 2004, the results of the OAV were known within 72 hours after the polling precincts closed.
“We hope to do the same this time around,” he said. (With a report by Inquirer News Service)
