THE Commission on Elections (Comelec) has discovered at least half a million double or multiple registrations for inclusion in the voters’ list as it prepares to come out this month with an accurate list of registered voters in preparation for the upcoming 2025 national and local elections.
Chairman George Erwin Garcia said on Tuesday that the applications for registration are under evaluation by the Election Registration Board (ERB), and through the process, it was found out that there were a total of 532,837 applicants with duplicate fingerprints on the automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS).
The cited number of double or multiple registrations came from the over 6 million new applicants during the Feb. 12 to Sept. 30 voter registration.
Garcia said that double or multiple registrations are an election offense punishable by up to six years imprisonment, but he assured the public that violators would be given the chance to explain the circumstances of their double or multiple registrations.
The Commission, he added, would come out with the final list of voters within the month, which would also serve as the basis for the total number of official ballots that would be printed for the 2025 midterm elections.
“The ballots that would be printed correspond to the one-ballot-per-voter ratio,” added Garcia.
Printing of ballots would start early or not later than the second week of December instead of the usual practice of doing it in the first month of the election year to ensure that whatever problems may crop up during the process will not affect the preparations timeline.
As of Oct. 26, 2024, the number of registered voters for 2025 polls totaled 68,571,499. Garcia said the number could still change because of the ongoing cleansing of the voters’ list.
The Comelec is projecting 70 million to 71 million voters in 2025 from the more than 66 million in 2022.
Garcia said that those who filled out the registration forms are not automatically registered but considered only applicants, saying that it is the city or municipal ERB that would determine if the applicant for registration will be approved or disapproved.
He said that the Comelec is eyeing to annul the list of registered voters after the 2025 midterm polls and conduct a new registration using new technology to ensure the integrity of the voters’ list and make multiple registrations impossible.
He said that he expects Congress to support his plan to annul the present list of voters and conduct a new registration for about three months using an entirely new technology that would include iris scanning, facial recognition and fingerprint scanning of all 10 fingers, among other features.
“I have not yet given up on my advocacy to really cleanse our list of voters. Hopefully, after the 2025 elections, our honorable Congress may decide to annul the entire voters’ list; we conduct a new registration for three months for a new start, using new biometrics, including iris and facial recognition and other features, including fingerprinting of not just four but 10 fingers,” added Garcia.
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