 |
Vice Consul Alex Vallespin and police officers ask the crowd to keep within bounds
|
For the first time since the election started in Hong Kong, police were called on Sunday, May 1, due to a commotion caused by rowdy campaigners at the bus terminal in front of the Bayanihan Center in Kennedy Town, where the voting is being held.
Vice Consul Alex Vallespin, officer in charge of overseas voting, and about six police officers rushed to the terminal to ask the campaigners to tone down.
“It turned out that somebody made a 999 call because one group was becoming rowdy,” said Vallespin, who spoke to leaders of the various campaign groups at the bus terminal.
During the discussion, one woman campaigner for Vice President Jejomar Binay said supporters of Rodrigo Duterte shouted their candidate’s name and surged towards voters disgorged by each arriving bus with their campaign tarpaulin.
In one instance, when supporters of the Mar Roxas-Leni Robredo tandem stepped forward and displayed their tarpaulin before a TV crew, the Duterte crowd swarmed in front of them, blocking them off with their own tarp.
“That’s uncalled for, that’s plain bullying,” said the Binay supporter.
Two voting-related incidents were also reported.
One voter complained that she picked Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos as her vice president in her ballot, but got a ballot receipt from the vote counting machine that bore the name of Gregorio Honasan.
“I asked the voter if she was sure about what she’s saying and she said ‘yes,’ because she was even campaigning for Bongbong,” Jun Carlos, a Bongbong campaign leader, told The SUN.
But he cast doubt on claims by some quarters that there was cheating in the overseas voting in Hong Kong just because of accusations by two out of over 32,000 voters who have voted so far.
In the other case, a woman filed an affidavit of complaint about her failing to vote.
She said that when she went to a mobile registration in Discovery Bay on Sept 5, she was told she did not have to register as she was still an active voter. On Sunday, she was told she had been deactivated.
With just eight days to go in the overseas voting for the
2016 Philippine general elections at Bayanihan Center, officials of the Consulate
are still positive that turnout will hit 50%.
Voters continued to stream into the polling center at
Bayanihan after the 5pm closing time, but election officials allowed them to
cast their ballots.
The day ended with 5,327 voters casting their ballots, the
second-lowest turnout for a Sunday in the month-long, five-Sunday elections.
The votes lifted the total tally to 32,028, indicating a 34.4% turnout
after 23 days of voting.
 |
Consul General Bernie Catalla assists voter who discovered
she had been deactivated by the Comelec
|
Vice Consul Vallespin said it
was still possible to hit the Consulate’s 50% turnout target on May 2,
if more Hong Kong-based Filipinos take the day off and vote.
About 40 people were unable to vote after finding
themselves having been deactivated by the Commission on elections. Another 115 had registered but their names were missing on the voters' list and waited
for the election secretariat to get them Comelec clearance to vote.
Election officials said earlier in the exercise that they
were expecting the Sunday voter crowd to reach 7,000, but that did not
materialize despite the fine weather.
Another vote counting device stopped working in Room
604, but election staff said it worked again after they restarted the machine.
Meanwhile, Ryan Salac, the last voter on Saturday whose
ballot was rejected by the counting machine, was given a new ballot to fill out after it was found the problem on Apr 30 was his defective ballot, not
the machine.
“We waited for two voters to feed their ballots into the
vote counting machine and when we saw they were successful, we called up
(Salac) and gave him a new ballot,” said Rhea Balicas, SSS representative who
sat as a member of the special board of election inspectors in Room 601.
Two more of the original 12 voters whose ballots were
likewise rejected by a broken machine on
April 24 came to cast new ballots, leaving only five of the group still needing
to vote anew. Five of the dozen returned
to vote on Apr 30. -- By Vir B. Lumicao
