*This appears as my first published article in The Business MirrorI get a lot of questions about validation. People often ask what it is and why it’s important. For starters, it must be understood that validation is very closely linked to biometrics and how the Commission on Elections (Comelec) is using biometrics to ensure that the list of voters is accurate and squeaky clean.
Validation is the means by which an individual can ensure that he is registered or that his registration as a voter is still active. There have been many cases when people complained about their names missing from the list of voters only to realize later on that they’re not actually registered, or that they were registered but had failed to vote in two consecutive regular elections. If you miss back-to-back regular elections, the law says that your record has to be deactivated—it’s still there, but it’s dormant and you can’t vote.
To avoid problems like that on Election Day, we encourage voters to validate their registrations and make sure they can vote in the next polls. All a person has to do is go to the local Comelec office and verify the status of his registration as a voter. If, for any reason, the validation shows that he isn’t a registered voter or that his record has been deactivated, he can then be asked to register with biometrics so he can vote.
If, on the other hand, he is a registered voter, then his name will show up on the list. The record will also indicate if his biometrics are in the system or not. If his biometrics are not in the system, he will be given the opportunity to have these taken so that his registration record can immediately be updated.
So that’s the link between validation and biometrics that I mentioned earlier. Validation is not just to make sure you’re on the list of voters. It is also a means of getting your biometrics into the Comelec’s voter-registration system.
Biometrics are essential to maintaining the accuracy of the list of voters because they allow us to positively identify every single person on the list. Remember that we have 44.2 million registered voters and that number grows daily. Without biometrics, keeping track of everyone on that list would be impossible.
Before the biometrics project was implemented, people with malicious intent would register in one place then register again somewhere else, or even in the same place but using a different name. Without any means to detect these illegal multiple registrations, our lists kept getting padded with fictitious names.
This “dirty” list of voters could then be used to facilitate massive fraud. Consider this: In every election, Comelec prints one ballot for every single registered voter. If you have a dirty list that is filled up with multiple registrants, you’ll have a huge number of excess ballots that can later be used to tilt the outcome through ballot box stuffing. Imagine that modus operandi being repeated across several precincts and you can see how serious the situation can become.
Today, people still attempt multiple registration, but the use of biometrics is making significant progress in discouraging the practice and discovering the attempts. Every new registrant’s biometric information is compared to the 30.8 million registered voters in our database. Since fingerprints are unique to a person, any match alerts us that someone is trying to register more than once, and his application is immediately flagged for disapproval. Unfortunately, with 13.2 million voters who have no biometrics in the database, we are actually screening only about 69 percent of the voting population.
Theoretically, anyone who registered before the start of the biometrics project could go in for registration now using a fake name. Since the database wouldn’t “know” that person’s biometrics yet, the double registration could remain undetected for a very long time. So, while biometric technology is helping, it will really not be able to identify all multiple registrants unless the database is 100-percent complete which, as of now, it isn’t.
In order to help in the completion of the database, there is a pending bill that, if signed into law, will make biometrics mandatory. Depending on when the law is passed, this could mean that as early as 2013, no biometrics, no vote.
Naturally, we can’t wait around for this bill to be signed into law. If we did that, we would end up with too little time to implement it and massive disfranchisement would be inevitable. So, in order to protect every registered voter’s right to vote, as much as to improve our ability to clean up the list, Comelec is asking everyone to validate his registration now.
And yes, that includes you.
James Jimenez blogs at http://jamesjimenez.com and tweets at @jabjimenez on Twitter.