Since the start of voter’s registration last May 03, 2011 for the 2013 National and Local Election, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) never stops encouraging the first time voters participate on this activity. The agency also encourage voter’s who transfer to other areas to file transfer forms to avoid possible hassle during election and also those who are inactive during the recent election to validate their registration with the COMELEC. With the help of Team Manila who created the Purple Ribbon Campaign for Reproductive Health Bill and Sooo Pinoy T-shirts in support of Filipino Culinary Tourism of Unilever Food Solutions, they created three posters that will remind everyone about their responsibility to register, validate and update their voter’s account with COMELEC. These posters were already posted in all stations of LRT Line 2, the purple train coming from Recto to Santolan Station. They will be posting the same posters soon on LRT Line 1 and MRT soon.
Last 2010 Election, COMELEC gathered 50,859,785 voters and approximately 75.03% or 38,162,988 participated. With the voter’s registration that will run from May 3, 2011 until October 2012, they are projecting voter’s population by 54,158,460 on 2013 having the possible increase of 3.8 million in 17 months.
Here are the posters that Team Manila designed for the campaign:
According to James Jimenez, Director IV of Education and Information Department, COMELEC in regards of the deceased, duplicate names and inactive they already in the process of cleaning up the list of voters as they prepare on the 2013 election. “We’re using an Automated Fingerprint Identification System – similar to that used by the FBI – which goes through the entire database of voter fingerprints trying to find matching pairs. If a matching pair is found, then that record is flagged for removal because that represents a double or multiple registrants. I don’t have the exact figures of records cleansed because that’s growing daily. But we’ve definitely cleaned up millions of multiple registrations.” Jimenez said.
COMELEC is very optimistic of the impact that this information drive that Team Manila created in informing everyone about their responsibility to register and validate their registration with them. Aside from the major railways posters will be distributed too in government offices and schools nationwide to encourage more participation on this activity. In regards if SMARTMATIC will still be COMELEC’s partner on 2013 election, Jimenez said that they don’t have a lock on contract with the said company in the future of elections and they are certainly open to acquiring new equipment, new systems, and new partners. “We’re already training key people in the election administration structure; we’re partnering with UP to improve our automated election system capabilities” He ended.
Be part of this voter’s registration campaign and participate on both local and national election. Like what I always say in my post in regards of politics and election, though election you can contribute on the change you want to happen on our county. Participation is the keyword of election, being part of the change and social transformation, whether your candidate win or not at least you try rather than doing nothing at all. To know about the list of COMELEC regional offices and requirements for registration and validation visit http://comelec.gov.ph.
