WITH only a few days to go before the Oct. 31 registration deadline for new voters, the city office of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) announced some of the electorate may not be able to cast ballots in next year’s polls.
This disclosure came after Comelec Officer Dinah Sapong said during a visit in her office that some of the names of the newly registered voters were lost when their database suffered glitches few weeks ago.
However, she assured that their office was able to secure a hard copy of the names of the new registrants and have already sent notices to their respective villages telling those concerned to visit the Comelec office as soon as possible and validate their registration.
This way, their names will be entered into the database again, Sapong said, while failure of doing so will lead to disenfranchisement.
Some 229 new voters in 32 barangays in Pagadian were listed by Sapong as those affected by the computer glitch and whose names needs to be validated once more.
Most of the missing names of new voters were from Kawit, Balangasan, Tiguma, San Jose, Tuburan, Sto. Niño, Sta. Lucia, San Pedro, Banale and Dao.
“Please inform these new voters to come back to our office and validate their registration again,” Sapong told this paper, further revealing that the turnout of first time voters can still be considered low, posting only 3,634 as of July.
Meanwhile, it was observed that although there are hardly any bottlenecks in the Comelec registration center, still, many new registrants are delaying their enlistment for no reason.
The comelec officer then urged new voters not to wait for the last minute in order that they will be accommodated accordingly.
Sapong informed this paper that since last week, their office will be open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., from Monday to Saturday while on Oct. 31, the last day of registration, they will be open until midnight.
The Comelec is targeting about three million new registrants by Oct. 31 on top of the 2.8 million people who have already registered while roughly 45.6 million of the country’s estimated 91 million population are qualified to vote on May 10, 2010.
REPORT BY MICHAEL MEDINA
This disclosure came after Comelec Officer Dinah Sapong said during a visit in her office that some of the names of the newly registered voters were lost when their database suffered glitches few weeks ago.
However, she assured that their office was able to secure a hard copy of the names of the new registrants and have already sent notices to their respective villages telling those concerned to visit the Comelec office as soon as possible and validate their registration.
This way, their names will be entered into the database again, Sapong said, while failure of doing so will lead to disenfranchisement.
Some 229 new voters in 32 barangays in Pagadian were listed by Sapong as those affected by the computer glitch and whose names needs to be validated once more.
Most of the missing names of new voters were from Kawit, Balangasan, Tiguma, San Jose, Tuburan, Sto. Niño, Sta. Lucia, San Pedro, Banale and Dao.
“Please inform these new voters to come back to our office and validate their registration again,” Sapong told this paper, further revealing that the turnout of first time voters can still be considered low, posting only 3,634 as of July.
Meanwhile, it was observed that although there are hardly any bottlenecks in the Comelec registration center, still, many new registrants are delaying their enlistment for no reason.
The comelec officer then urged new voters not to wait for the last minute in order that they will be accommodated accordingly.
Sapong informed this paper that since last week, their office will be open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., from Monday to Saturday while on Oct. 31, the last day of registration, they will be open until midnight.
The Comelec is targeting about three million new registrants by Oct. 31 on top of the 2.8 million people who have already registered while roughly 45.6 million of the country’s estimated 91 million population are qualified to vote on May 10, 2010.
REPORT BY MICHAEL MEDINA