Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — Wednesday (April 27) marked the start of local absentee voting. Government workers, uniformed servicemen, and members of the media were allowed to vote in advance until Friday if they will be on duty on election day (May 9).
Local absentee voters will be using the manual mode of voting. They will write their chosen candidates’ names on the ballot. After that, they will slip the ballot into an envelope provided by the Commission on Elections (Comelec), seal it with the official Comelec sticker, and then slip it into another envelope and seal it again with another sticker to make sure no one takes a peek into the vote.
More than 24,000 voters have signed up for local absentee voting. They can only vote for national positions: president, vice president, senators, and a party-list.
Comelec: Poll cheating rumors baseless
The Comelec said more than 191,000 Filipinos have already cast their ballots overseas — that is more than 13 percent of registered overseas absentee voters in 18 days and it already exceeds the turnout in 2010 and 2013.
Commissioner-in-charge Arthur Lim expects the turnout to reach at least 40 percent or half their target of 80 percent.
Rumors circulated on social media showing that voter receipts reveal discrepancies in how vote-counting machines interpret ballots. The rumors are implying that there’s cheating going on.
But Lim said those rumors seem baseless because there are no official reports of the incidents talked about on social media.
He added it’s easy for any voter to claim there’s an anomaly in their receipt, but the Comelec will still investigate those claims.
“Hindi po totoo na maraming VVPAT (voter-verified paper audit trail) hindi tugma sa binoto ng ating mga kababayan. Walang complaints of that sort na talagang masabi mong maraming ganoon,” said Lim.
[Translation: It’s not true that many VVPATs do not reflect the votes cast by Filipinos overseas. There are no complaints of those sort of things to conclude that it is happening.]
In March, the Supreme Court ruled that the Comelec must provide a VVPAT, which means a printed receipt.
The Comelec warned then that some might try to sabotage the polls by claiming discrepancies on their voter receipts.
