Despite great strides having been made in the campaign to ensure that all registered voters have biometrics data in their voter registration records, a lot remains to be done. These numbers of registered voters with incomplete biometrics – or none at all – broken down by Region, speak for themselves.
- NCR – 549,614
- CAR – 88,839
- Region I – 303,224
- Region II – 312,694
- Region III – 548,705
- Region IV-A – 523,308
- Region IV-B – 484,904
- Region V – 450,776
- Region VI – 129,532
- Region VII – 408,525
- Region VIII – 273,267
- Region IX – 144,433
- Region X – 236,190
- Region XI – 218,367
- Region XII – 172,028
- CARAGA – 159,845
- ARMM – 4
- Cotabato City – 25,189
- Isabela City – 0
Biometrics data – comprised of the voter’s digital image, his digitally captured signature, and digitally captured finger prints – definitively links the voter’s identity to the corresponding voter registration record which contains his voting history, among other things.
The biometrics data guarantees that the voter’s identity cannot be stolen by anyone, i.e., no one can vote pretending to be someone he is not. Relatedly, this also means that biometrics, in combination with a computer program that scours the database for multiple sets of the same biometrics, eliminates double registration since no two people can have the same unique biometrics data. Sure, people can change their names and change their looks, but virtually no one can change their fingerprints. So, if the database search turns up two “individuals” with the same set of fingerprints, the fact of illegal double registration is proven conclusively.
At the same time, the link with the voter registration record ensures that multiple voting by the same person can no longer be done, thus spelling the end of flying voters.
Interestingly, those with longer memories will remember that the COMELEC started integrating biometrics into the voter registration records as far back as 2003 – more than a decade ago. At that time however, the use of biometrics as a sort of gateway to exercising the right to vote, wasn’t a requirement of law. This meant that a voter could have no biometrics but still be allowed to vote. As a result, the potential of biometrics technology was far from maximized.
Double registrants could not be identified conclusively as a person with biometrics might have previously registered under a different name without biometrics. Consequently, voters lists would then be generated with two identities for the same person, making multiple voting a distinct possibility.
Republic Act 10367 (15 February 2013) changed all that by mandating that
Voters who fail to submit for validation on or before the last day of filing of application for registration for purposes of the May 2016 elections shall be deactivated pursuant to this Act.
This made biometrics mandatory and established biometrics as a gateway for exercising the right to vote.
Unfortunately, with the law being of so recent vintage, by the time it kicked in, more than 9 million registered voters remained outside the biometrics fold. In other words, more than 9 million had been voting since 2003 without biometrics – most of them having voted as recently as the 2013 Barangay Elections. With the new law in operation, these voters would suddenly find themselves disenfranchised is they failed to submit themselves for biometrics capture by the end of October 2015.
This made biometrics a top-priority for the COMELEC in 2014.
Thankfully, since the voter registration period started on the 6th of May 2014, the number of people with no biometrics has gone down to 5,029,444, although admittedly, that is still a large number.
And so there’s the continuing challenge. from the time voter registration resumes on the 5th of January 2015 up to the time it ends on the 31st of October of the same year, more than 5 million people have to bestir themselves to see to their biometrics. If they don’t, they will find themselves unceremoniously shut out of the 2016 elections, whether or not they’ve been regular voters up to that point.
If we go by simple maths, this means that there will have to be 502,945 applications for biometrics validation every month for the first ten months of 2015. Considering that in 2014, we saw only an average of about 640 thousand validation applications per quarter, it should be pretty clear just how big of a challenge this is.
I believe, however, that this is not insurmountable.
Keeping in mind that getting these 5+ million voters validated is a shared responsibility of all, there are a number of things that can be done.
First, and most important, is to ensure that voters without biometrics KNOW that they have to validate. In order to find out who the voters without biometrics are, all a person has to do is visit this page. That’ll take you to this dialogue box:
Just fill out the fields using the drop down menus and there you go. Take note of the reminder at the top of the page, however.
Once you’ve identified people without biometrics that you know, inform them personally. Studies have shown that when we get information from our friends and family, we are more likely to act on that information than if we got the same information from some “official” source. So, sharing this info with the people that matter to you is the most effective way to make sure that they’re able to vote in 2016/
Another thing you can do is ask your barangay to request satellite registration for your area. This will benefit not just the people who need biometrics, but also new voters, people who’ve transferred, and so on. To make your requested satellite registration activity even more successful. you can print out flyers announcing the date, time, and venue of the satellite registration, and distribute those flyers around your neighborhood. You’d be surprised at how little most people know about the goings-on in their own barangays.
And finally, you can share this post with the people on your social networks. This is both the easiest thing for you to do, and possibly the most effective at getting the info out to a lot of people.
Just to recap, we can successfully meet this continuing BIOMETRICS challenge by banding together and getting the word out through the channels available to us. We can identify who needs biometrics by going to the COMELEC website, and then use that info to inform our friends and family on that list that they need to get their biometrics taken; we can ask our barangay officials to request satellite registration for your area, and we can help make it more effective by distributing flyers; and we can share this and other BIOMETRICS related info on our social webz.
Voter Registration and Biometrics Validation resumes January 5, 2015
In the meantime, I leave you with this:
And this potato that would have been socially responsible.
