Worth the effort

By James Jimenez

Voter registration ends on September 30, 2024 and the filing of Certificates of Candidacy begins in October. To say that election season is upon us is no exaggeration. As a vigilant and lucid voter, the time to start preparing to exercise your right of suffrage is now.

Registration

With less than a month to go before the registration period ends, now would be a perfect time for you to see to your voter registration status. In my 20 years with the Commission on Elections, this is the most common reason for people not finding their names on the voter rolls. While there are some case where missing names are really probably due to some error on the side of the COMELEC, many more are simply due to the fact that the voter was deactivated for any one of a variety of reasons – the most common being that they failed to vote in two consecutive regular elections. For the most part, that means they didn’t vote in the immediately preceding National and Local Elections and the Barangay elections that followed immediately after.

Less frequently, but it still happens, people simply forget that they didn’t vote in the last elections and that the last elections they actually showed up for was two or three national elections previously. Since our elections are held every three years, that means the last time they voted was anywhere from three to six years ago. Under those circumstances, it shouldn’t be surprising that they’ve been deactivated from the rolls and therefore unable to vote.

The fix is simple: if you find out that you’ve been deactivated – i.e., your name no longer appears on the roll of active voters, which means you can vote in the coming polls – just file an application for reactivation. What that does is that it tells the COMELEC you’re back and willing to vote. The end result of the application is that COMELEC restores you to the active list, enabling you to vote.

Another perennial complaint that can be resolved by simply updating registration records before the end of the registration period is the persistence of dead people on the rolls.

The Voting Dead

The allegation that “even the dead vote” may have originated in the famously flawed Philippine elections of 1949. During that election, it was also said that “even the birds, bees, and trees voter,” referring to soldiers herding people into voting centers to cast their ballot – at times, under threat.  Post-biometrics project however – the biometrics project introduced the use of fingerprints as a means of ensuring the integrity of the list of voters – the existence of dead people in the rolls has become a decidedly less dramatic and less nefarious affair.

Today, when a dead person shows up on the list of voters, it is likely because COMELEC didn’t know that the person was deceased and so did not act to strike their name from the list, rather than some diabolical plot to rig the elections. Again, the fix is simple: relatives of the deceased person must inform the COMELEC of their relative’s death, and COMELEC will delist their names.

In an ideal world, the fact of any person’s death should be automatically reported to the COMELEC by the Civil Registrar. Once informed, the COMELEC then initiates the process of removing that person’s name from the list. While this Civil Registrar – COMELEC connection has been the subject of improvement efforts recently, it remains an imperfect system and some names still remain on the lists that shouldn’t be there. But as I said, the fix is simple. It just requires some effort on the part of the relatives of deceased.

Get ready

The coming midterm elections are crucial. They provide us – the electorate – an opportunity to express our approval or disapproval of the current administration’s performance. These elections will decide who gets to sit in the House of Representatives, and brings in a fresh batch of 12 Senators to the Senate. This overhaul will influence legislative priorities, the passage of laws, and the balance of power between political parties. Most importantly – especially considering today’s political climate – these midterm elections will shape the political landscape leading up to the next Presidential elections in 2028.

If you don’t want to miss out on being a part of this – and trust me, you don’t – consider this article as your sign to verify your eligibility to vote, and to make any necessary updates to your voter registration record. Whether you’re reactivating your registration, or transferring or reporting any changes, such as reporting the passing of a relative, now is the time to get it done.

By making this effort now, you ensure that when the second Monday of May 2025 rolls around, you will be able to participate in the elections, and in so doing, reinforce the integrity of our democratic system. And that’s, for sure, worth the effort.