MANILA – An official of the Philippine Commission on Elections (Comelec) reported on Wednesday that a total of 250,000 new voters have been included in the list of those qualified to participate in the coming May national and local elections.
Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal explained the 250,000 came from those who joined in the five-day extended registration of voters as ordered by the Supreme Court (SC) in late December.
Larrazabal said the SC ordered the extension, citing a law which provides that the registration of new voters should be held at least 120 days before the election.
The High Court granted the petition of youth groups for an extension as they questioned the legality of a Comelec resolution setting October 31, 2009 as the deadline for the registration of new voters.
However, Larrazabal noted that the 250,000 new voters were way below the four million qualified Filipinos who were feared to be disenfranchised by failing to meet the October 31 deadline set by the Comelec.
With the new voters, the number of those allowed to vote in the May polls this year is expected to reach 49.2 million as against the 45.02 million who cast their ballots in the May 2007 midterm elections, he said.
Of the total, Larrazabal said about 600,000 would be composed of qualified overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who registered in the various Philippine diplomatic posts abroad under the country’s Overseas Voting Act.
At the same time, a reliable Comelec source, who sought anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to media on the issue, blamed the “manana†(tomorrow) habit of the Filipinos for the low turnout of new voters in the extended registration.
The source pointed out the new voters flocked to the Comelec centers nationwide at the start of the five-day registration in December but their number noticeably thinned out in the succeeding days.
On the last day of registration, however, there was again an influx of voters which is “a testimony to the manana habit of our people of doing tomorrow what they could have done much earlier,†the source stressed.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Party (LP) announced it is deploying a 600,000-strong “Yellow Army†of volunteers to campaign for and guard the votes in the May polls of its standard bearer Senator Benigno “Noynoy†Aquino, the only son of the late global democracy icon president Corazon Aquino.
Aquino has maintained his lead as the frontrunner in the public opinion polls conducted on who will succeed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the May elections.
Former congressman Florencio Abad, the LP campaign manager, said this would be part of the “non-conventional†campaign of the party to persuade undecided voters to support Aquino, his running mate Senator Mar Roxas and the rest of the slate.
But Abad added the LP would also venture into traditional campaigning through media advertisements and sorties nationwide to introduce Aquino and the rest of the party candidates for other national and local elective positions.
He said: “In the next four months of the campaign, we will depend on this Yellow Army of volunteers, especially in the provinces to conduct the more intensive campaigning for our candidates.â€
Abad said the volunteers would be recruited, trained and mobilized to multiply their number not just for the campaign but also to serve as watchers on Election Day.
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