Tens of millions of pesos, if not a billion or two, have been spent on the voters’ identification cards (VIC), which never seems to take off, making one wonder whether the Commission on Elections (Comelec), having been given a very generous budget for this and the election proper, is up to the job of conducting a fraud-free and orderly election nationwide.
Again, bowing to the dictates of computerization, the Comelec has suspended the printing of the VIC, with the poll body saying that the printing will resume after the records of 50 million registered voters were done with the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), a system where data capturing machines (DCM) are utilized to get the photographs, fingerprints and signatures of voters.
The biometrics is then cross-matched to eliminate double and multiple registrants.
The poll body claims it is impractical to issue the VIC as double and multiple registrants have not been purged from the list. Yet the same poll body says that voters who have the biometric ID will enjoy a hassle free balloting.
The logic escapes me. There have already been voters issued the biometric ID even when the voters’ list has not been fully purged. Why should this be a problem today?
The poll body itself said that in the 2007 elections, some 27 million of the 45 million voters had their biometrics taken. That was two years ago. There must be more than that number today, given the registration mode the Comelec is in today. Why stop this then?
The stoppage of the printing of the VIC, said the poll body is also the lack of paper since October last year.
But shouldn’t the Comelec have done something about this lack of paper supply, since it knew of this lack for a year?
Since the late Nineties, the Comelec has been coming up with the so-called purging of the ineligible voters and multiple registrants, as well the VIC system, even when this was not, in those days, of the biometric system. Yet every election year, the Comelec comes up empty, when it comes down to really eliminating the ghost and dead voters, and the multiple, as well as the ineligible voters — especially of those minors in Muslim Mindanao. To this day, however, the poll body has not succeeded in eliminating these voters from the list, which of course translates to multiple electoral fraud at the first step in poll fraud.
The Comelec only comes to life every election year — the biggest of which comes every three years, as the barangay polls and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao elections come in between and are usually postponed, for one reason or another.
In between time, the Comelec is hardly the most important government agency and is even out of the public eye — unless of course a big scandal rocks it, such as the “Hello Garci” scandal and the ZTE-NBN deal which involved the then Comelec chairman — although the poll body is expected, during non-election years, to work on the poll protests, at which the poll body has proved to be much too inefficient and incompetent, since the poll protests of losing candidates for local executive posts during the 2007 polls, have hardly been resolved up to this time, when the terms of offices are almost finished. What is even worse is the fact that the 2004 poll protests were never even acted on by the Comelec, which claimed that a fire destroyed all records.
But there went the Comelec again, saying that all these benefits of the VIC, will be felt in 2013. It is almost certain, that come the next polls, if they ever come, the Comelec will still be plagued by the same problems, and even bigger ones, as the poll body certainly isn’t prepared for the automated polls nationwide.
From the developments unfolding in the Comelec, it is almost certain that this presidential election will be all screwed up, as it is clearly unprepared for everything, especially the automated polls nationwide.
Source: http://www.tribune.net.ph/commentary/20091014com1.html
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