Voter numbers surged dramatically today, May 5, as members
of the Iglesia Ni Cristo began casting their ballots in the 2016 Philippine general
elections, raising hopes the Consulate will hit its 50% turnout target.
At the close of today’s polling at the Bayanihan Centre, 829
votes had been tallied, a record high for a weekday, which drove up the total
votes to 37,399.
The total represented a 40.5% turnout of the more than 93,000
registered Filipino voters in Hong Kong .
An otherwise smooth going in the precincts was marred by another
complaint from a voter about an alleged receipt misprint.
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| Consul Charles Macaspac |
“The voter said she marked Bongbong (Ferdinand Marcos Jr)
for vice president but it was the name of Gregorio Honasan that appeared on the
printed receipt,” said Consul Charles Macaspac, who was in charge of the day’s
voting.
Macaspac said the woman filed an affidavit, the sixth to do
so out of about 20 who made a similar complaint.
Election officials in Hong Kong
have been urging voters to fill up a pro forma affidavit if they believe they
have been cheated out of their votes so that the Commission on Elections could
investigate their complaints.
In Manila
yesterday, Comelec Commissioner Robert Lim said in a TV interview that complaints
about receipts not reflecting the voter’s choices would not be investigated on
site unless there were a significant number of people making the same
allegation. He also said the receipts could be used by a losing candidate in an
electoral protest.
Today, eight people were not allowed to vote because their
registration had been deactivated for failing to vote in the past two electionsm
in 2010 and 2013.
Eight other people whose names were missing from the
certified list of voters were cleared to vote by the Comelec.
In an unusual case, the election secretariat received an sms
from its Macau counterpart verifying the
eligibility of a certain Veronica G. Lim, who was trying to vote there.
She was indeed registered in Hong Kong but had moved to
Macau, so she was allowed to vote there but her registration in Hong Kong was cancelled.
This was exactly the opposite of what happened on day 1 of
the elections, when a woman claiming to be a registered voter in Macau asked to
vote in Hong Kong . She was turned down then
because the Comelec had not yet issued a policy allowing overseas voters who
have migrated to another place to cast their ballot in their new location. – Vir B. Lumicao
