EDITORIAL - Disenfranchised

Some quarters place the figure at two to three million. The Social Weather Stations (SWS), in its exit poll, estimated that about 900,000 people failed to vote last week because they could not find their names on voters’ lists.

The report was not surprising. Enough alarms were sounded for weeks before election day as the Commission on Elections failed to release an updated list of voters that incorporated the revalidation of old voters last year as well as the registration of new voters. When the updated lists were finally released, in the final days of the campaign, there were howls of protests from registered voters who found their names missing or spotted erroneous entries. Exasperated Comelec officials then told field personnel to use their own discretion in deciding which list – the old or the updated version – was more accurate and should be used on election day.

Expecting the chaos, however, should not let Comelec officials off the hook. The Comelec bungled this one big time. Those 900,000 are a lot of votes – so much more than the 60 percent or so of some 340,000 registered overseas Filipino workers who participated in absentee voting. Those 900,000 votes can carry a lot of weight in a tight race; Fidel Ramos won the presidency in 1992 by a slim margin of 800,000. If the SWS exit poll is accurate, President Arroyo will win the race by a much more comfortable margin. That does not lessen the importance of 900,000 votes. The fight could be closer in the races for the vice presidency and the Senate; those 900,000 could spell victory or defeat for certain candidates.

Once the canvassing is over, the Comelec must clean up the voters’ list and release the voters’ identification cards that millions of people who bothered to revalidate failed to receive. At the same time, however, concerned groups should determine how Comelec officials can be made to account for the disenfranchisement of 900,000 voters. Those were voices that were not heard in the elections, and someone should pay for it.