Perhaps thousands of people decided, all at the same time, to change residences, and considered it their civic duty to register as new voters in their new addresses. Video footage and photographs showed hordes of people crowding voter registration centers or waiting in line even in heavy rain the other day, the deadline for the new list-up for the barangay and youth council elections in October.
Some of the faces in the crowd looked sufficiently young to qualify as new voters for the Sangguniang Kabataan or SK elections. But most of the others looked way past their teens. Did so many fail to register as voters for the past decades? Are they all new in their neighborhoods and needed to register again?
The Commission on Elections must find out. There are rumors of cash changing hands and promises of a moratorium on relocation for informal settlers who register as new voters. The Comelec must do its best to purge flying voters or double registrants from the list. The SK is controversial enough without the elections being compromised by illegal voters.
Comelec officials have warned that flying voters will be penalized. A major concern is whether the poll body has the capability to verify the qualifications of each new registrant. The best way to verify is to enlist the help of barangay officials. Obviously this is a problem if the barangay officials themselves were the ones who instigated the fraudulent registration.
Even with limited resources, however, the Comelec must move to purge the voter’s list quickly. If the Comelec fails to do so and the voter’s list has become heavily padded, the same corrupted list will be used in the general elections in 2016 where the stakes are bigger.