Overseas Filipinos start voting

The first day of the month-long overseas absentee voting (OAV) started out slow on April 9 since most of the migrant Filipinos were at work, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said.
Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista said the first post that started the voting was in Wellington, New Zealand which is four hours ahead of the Philippines.
There are 1,376,067 million Filipinos who registered as OAV worldwide. This is double the 737,000 voters in the 2013 elections.
The Comelec is targeting to also double this year the 16.11 percent voter turn-out for OAV in 2013.
“This is one of the areas by which we will measure the success of the elections,” Bautista said.
At least 85 Philippine posts are open to Filipino voters abroad, but only 30 posts have automated voting. The others have manual elections, either through postal or personal voting.
Figures from the Comelec show that 593,772 of the OAV are in the Middle East and Africa; 344,848 in Asia-Pacific; 275,729 in North and Latin America; and 161,718 in Europe. A total of 49,360 of them are seafarers while 1,323,641 are land-based.