DAY 16: LESS THAN 6,000 TURNOUT AS RAIN, INCIDENTS MAR VOTING

The rain did not deter them
from casting their ballots 

Seasonal rain marred the third Sunday of overseas voting for the 2016 national elections today, dampening hopes for a new record tally in the month-long exercise.

At the end of the day, 5,659 cast their votes, about 1,000 fewer than the tally for the previous Sunday.

But more than hobbling with one vote counting machine down, the bigger concern yesterday was the growing list of people being unable to vote because their names were not in the list furnished by the Commission on Elections.

As of 3pm, 34 voters found to their dismay that their registration had been deactivated because they failed to vote twice consecutively in previous elections.

Another 80 who registered last year were not on the list.

Those whose names were deactivated did not stand a chance, but those who had been mistakenly left out of the list were made to wait while the secretariat texted Comelec to try to get them cleared to vote.

These were among those whose names
were not in tne list of voters

Two incidents were noted by poll watchers, one involving a voter who was mistakenly given two ballots that were stuck together, and another who complained about being threatened with a suit because she had taken a picture of her receipt.

In the first case, the poll watcher said the ballots could not be inserted into the vote counting machine so the SBEI (special board of election inspectors) marked the ballots as spoiled.

But according to Vice Consul Alex Vallespin, the voter was made to choose which of the two ballots she wanted to insert into the machine: the first where her choices for president, vice president and senators were marked, or the second with her partylist vote.

The voter chose the first.

In the second case, the voter returned to her precinct with two media representatives to confront the SBEI member who allegedly threatened to file a case against her afer taking a picture of her receipt.

But Vallespin assured her that her complaint had already been forwarded to Comelec, so there was no need to take a picture of her receipt, which was really prohibited under election rules.

The Consulate’s total tally after the 16^th day of the month-long balloting was 23,312 votes, or 25% of the 93,000 registered Filipino voters in Hong Kong. – Vir B. Lumicao