AN ELECTORAL REFORM GROUP predicted that Monday’s mid-term elections will likely be relatively orderly and peaceful, but raised concerns that vote-buying and padded voters’ lists remain as persistent problems in Philippine elections.
The Institute on Political and Economic Reforms (IPER) and the Consortium on Electoral Reforms (CER) gave this assessment in a briefing for media groups in the run-up to the May 13, 2013 mid-term elections on Monday.
CER Chairman Ramon Casiple said that all indications point to the orderly conduct of the elections on Monday, with the same precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines that were used in the 2010 elections being used again. Casiple said that while some have raised many concerns over the failure of the Commission on Elections to undertake an independent review of the source code, or the PCOS software, this is not a major issue as the source code had worked well enough in the 2010 elections.
What is important, Casiple says, is that the source code was already certified as working by SysTest Lab, Inc.
However, Casiple expressed concerns that the voters’ list has not been fully purged of multiple or fake registrants. An indication of just how questionable the voters’ list may be is shown by last year’s reregistration of voters in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). In that reregistration, the Comelec trimmed the ARMM voters list by half a million voters, from 1.7 million voters to only 1.2 million voters. The half million cancelled voters were found to be either multiple registrants, or ghost registrants.
Casiple said this is a sign of just how unreliable the current voters’ list is. The last general registration of voters was conducted in 1997, or 16 years ago.
“Yung ganung kalaki na natanggal only confirmed the suspicions sa problema sa ARMM before,” Casiple said. “Pero sa ARMM lang iyun. What about the rest of the country?
(The huge number of cancelled voters in ARMM only confirmed all the suspicions of the problems in ARMM. But that is only in ARMM. What about the rest of the country?)
“The rest of the country still has that old registry still dating back to the 1997 general registration,” he said.
The other persistent problem, Casiple said, is the prevalence of vote-buying. Casiple said that their reports from the field indicate that the average price of a vote is now at P 1,500.
The amount however varies from region to region, also depending on how heated the local contest is. For example, Casiple said that some reports peg the price of a vote at only P500 in Manila, while it could go as high as P2,000 in Pasig City. In parts of Mindanao, the price appears to have skyrocketed, with votes being bought at P7,000 in Lanao and up to P10,000 in Monkayo, a municipality in Compostela Valley which also plays host to the gold-rich area of Mount Diwalwal.