The Commission on Elections (Comelec) weeded out more than 1 million Filipinos from the list of voters in the May 14 midterm elections.
Comelec Commissioner Rene Sarmiento said the poll body was able to de-list a total of 1.13 million unscrupulous” voters, bringing down to 45.5 million the number of qualified voters for the May polls.
Sarmiento said the report came from the Comelecs Elections and Barangay Affairs Department.
He said the report showed that the de-listed voters were composed of people who were either convicted by court, considered incompetent due to insanity, failed to vote in two successive regular elections, lost Filipino citizenship, excluded from voting through a court order, already dead or registered twice for the elections.
As of today, our certified list of voters is 100 percent clean. This is the first time that we have cleansed the voters list after so many years,” said Sarmiento in an interview with reporters on Wednesday.
He said the National Capital Region posted the highest number of unqualified voters with 73,430.
Meanwhile, Sarmiento said a total of 6,059 names were de-listed from voters of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
In the May 2004 elections, there were 100,000 people in the ARMM removed from the voters list.
With the new voters list, we expect that the coming elections will be cleaner and more credible,” Sarmiento said. (PIA Dispatch) davaotoday.com
2007 Elections
