Press Release
January 2, 2009

Cleanup of voters' list is Comelec as important as automation - Pimentel

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Q. Pimentel, Jr. (PDP-Laban) today urged the Commission on Elections to diligently pursue the cleanup of the list of voters this year by completing the biometric registration and identification of voters.

Pimentel said the purge of flying or bogus voters is as important as the automation of the voting and counting of votes to ensure honest, orderly and credible elections in 2010.

Noting a Comelec report that 24 million or half of the 48 million Filipino voters are already covered by the biometric listing, he said the poll body should persuade the rest of the voting population to register under the new system through intensified information and education campaign.

"The biometric process would eliminate the possibility of one and the same person being registered in many precincts and, therefore, allowed to votes so many times," the senator from Mindanao said.

Pimentel decried that the biometric registration of voters remains an unfinished task considering that it was started in 2004 at a cost of P1 billion.

He said there are good reasons behind a Comelec for Congress to enact a law that will provide that those who refuse or fail to undergo biometric registration shall be delisted from the roster of voters and disqualified from voting in the 2010 and other future elections.

The opposition lawmaker said that the use of flying voters remains a serious problem in the country's electoral system which should not be underestimated or ignored by poll authorities.

He said it is through this foul tactic that many an unscrupulous and corrupt politician has cheated his way to victory and kept himself in power, which is made possible through the connivance of dishonest election officials.

"It is very important that we get the cleansing process of the voters going and finished. The Comelec has started to do that sometime in the past and I really hope that they will be able to accomplish the objective of providing every precinct with a clean list of voters so that we can start correctly on the right foot from the very process of getting to the polls and casting their votes," Pimentel said.

He also lauded the Comelec for its plan to require its field officials all over the country to conduct house-to-house counter-checking of voters.

Theoretically, he said the house-to-house verification appears to be a sound approach to ferret out flying voters. But he said he is not too sure whether the Comelec has enough personnel to do that.

Pimentel said it may be more practical for election authorities to undertake random counter-checking of households, starting with those where there is an unusually huge number of registered voters.

He said the Comelec should act fast on complaints or reports of the existence if flying voters in certain areas.

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