Group urges Comelec to return to manual voting to avoid ballot wastage
An elderly woman is assisted as she undergoes biometric procedure at a voters’ registration facility in Binondo, Manila in January 2023 just days before the deadline for poll registration. (File photo from INQUIRER/ MARIANNE BERMUDEZ)
MANILA, Philippines — To avoid any delay in printing of ballots, a poll watchdog urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to return to manual voting but with automated transmission.
Kontra Daya convenor Danilo Arao floated this idea on Monday as the Comelec discarded six million ballots for the upcoming midterm polls, incurring a P132 million in losses.
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On Jan. 14, the Supreme Court blocked Comelec’s move to declare Senate hopeful Subair Guinthum Mustapha a nuisance candidate.
The high tribunal ordered the poll body to include Mustapha in the list of senatorial candidates even if the printing process had started.
The printed ballots of these batches did not bear his name.
Hence, Comelec needed to reprint.
Arao said the return to manual voting will prevent a delay since voters can just write their preferred candidates themselves.
“If the ballots are just simply blank spaces for allotted slots, for example for senators, there would only be 12 blank items there. For mayor – one, vice mayor – one, party-list – one,” Arao suggested.
“If we do that, it would be possible to continuously [print the ballots] whatever incoming decisions there may be on the part of the Supreme Court,” the University of the Philippines professor told INQUIRER.net over the phone.
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Arao said their proposed “hybrid elections” will save “billions of pesos” as this requires minimal equipment like laptops.
“The only thing that we need would be for certain gadgets like laptops that would have the capacity to transmit and it’s easy to procure,” he said. “These are the measures that would make it cheaper because the transmission aspect does not need any specific machine.”
“Actually, if Comelec would already have such laptops at its disposal already, we don’t need to even buy new ones,” he further noted.
For Arao, there is still time for Comelec to consider this recommendation.
“It’s best to have a hybrid system at this particular point,” he said. “Let me stress, it’s not too late to do that because it’s just simply a shift in the orientation of the election.”
