There will be no general registration covering the entire Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. There, will, however be one in the province of Maguindanao and possibly in other specific areas where the annulment of the book of voters is found to be necessary. This was the essence of COMELEC Resolution No. 9404, promulgated 18, 2012.
The biggest reason for this decision is that there is simply not enough time to conduct a general registration throughout ARMM. In order to better explain that we must first and foremost keep in mind that, the printing and allocation of ballots [the process of determining how many ballots are assigned to every single polling place all across the country] for 2013 require that, by December 2012, the list of voters be complete and final. Otherwise, the ballot printing process will start very late – possibly well into 2013 – and will be very vulnerable to haste-induced errors, breakdowns, and security breaches. This would put the 2013 elections at too much risk – far greater risk, in fact, than the COMELEC is willing to accept.
Now, keeping that December deadline in mind, consider this:
1. In order for a general registration to be held, a petition must be filed calling for the annulment of the books of voters in all municipalities. The petition must then be published and all interested parties – those who oppose for instance – must then be heard. This hearing will have to prove that the list is the product of fraud, forgery, impersonation, intimidation, force, and so on. Proving all that will definitely take at least 2 months.
2. For general registration, we need to scrap a list of voters that is 1.7 million strong. We’ve arrived at this number over a long period of several years, so we actually have very few voter registration machines in the field. Assuming that the same number of voters come in for registration during the week-long [more or less] period of general registration, these machines will inevitably be over-matched. This means that the in order for the general registration to proceed without foul-ups, the COMELEC will need to buy more of them – a process that will realistically take about four to six months. Ok, let’s say four.
At this point, take a step back and consider where we are on the calendar, keeping the December deadline firmly in mind. If anyone were to file a petition to annul the list of voters for the whole ARMM, we’ll have a ruling out by the end of June at the earliest. At that point, we will have to start procuring the voter registration machines that will be needed. This means that the earliest the special registration can be held is the last week of September or – perhaps more realistically – the 2nd week of October. Which leaves less than two months to wrap things up and finalize the list of voters – something that needs to be done by December.
Incidentally, to date, only the book of voters in Maguindanao is being challenged at the COMELEC. The other four provinces of ARMM – Lanao del Sur, Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi Tawi – are largely quiet. So, even if the COMELEC were inclined to grant other petitions, those petitions have to be filed in the first place.
3. And finally, since the ostensible purpose of this push for general registrations is to ensure that the list is clean and free from multiple registrations, we must see if there is even time enough to do that after you’ve completed the general registration exercise around the third week of October [given a one-week registration period]. In order to ensure the clean-ness of the list, the COMELEC runs the voter registration records through a program called AFIS – the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Now the AFIS isn’t quite as quick as you see it portrayed on crime shows like NCIS. In order to sort through the more than a million registration records from the ARMM, it’ll take at least 2 months. Add that to our tally and we end up approximately in the third week of December 2012. And we haven’t even started preparing for the printing and allocation of ballots.
Now all of that time-tabling is based on strictly best-case scenarios, with no allowances built in for the thousand and one things that can muck up the process and slow everything down.
As bleak as that picture looks, there are a couple of other issues that make general registration a very problematic proposition. First, there is the cost. It is estimated that a general registration in the ARMM now – what with the need to buy new voter registration machines – would set the national coffers back by four hundred ninety million, eight hundred ninety-two thousand, nine hundred forty-two pesos.
And second, a general registration exercise in the ARMM would completely overwhelm the total manpower available to the COMELEC in that Region. This means that personnel will have to be flown in from neighboring provinces in the Visayas and Mindanao. The situation then would be that, while people get their general registration in the ARMM, the registration process in the neighboring areas are effectively shut-down for at least two months; needless to say, massive disenfranchisement will be inevitable in those areas.
Time, cost, disenfranchisement elsewhere. Weigh these considerations against the facts: Number one, apart from Maguindanao and a handful of small jurisdictions outside of Maguindanao, no one has asked for the annulment of the list of voters; number two, the implementation of the AFIS program has already netted thousands of multiple registrants in the ARMM, and is continuing to clean up the list on a daily basis; and number three, with general registrations proceeding all across the ARMM, it is inevitable that unscrupulous persons will field “flying registrants” that will result in a final list bloated with multiple registrants that the AFIS will not have time to identify and purge.
The conclusion – and the decision – is almost self-evident: If we conduct a general registration in the ARMM now, we will definitely end up with a list of voters that is even dirtier and more unreliable than the existing list is. The solution, in other words, will turn out t be far worse than the problem ever was.