An OFW practices shading the ovals on a magic slate-cum-sample ballot. Overseas absentee voting starts on April 10.
The biggest Filipino organization in Hong Kong today assailed the Commission on Elections for belatedly “reconfiguring” election precincts just days before April 10, the start of overseas absentee voting for Filipinos working and living abroad.
Dolores Balladares, chairperson of the United Filipinos in Hong Kong (Unifil) said the Overseas Absentee Voting Secretariat (OAVS) in Hong Kong revealed new precinct assignments at the Bayanihan Kennedy Town Centre just four days before polls open on Saturday.
“Because of this reconfiguration of precincts, thousands of OFWs who have been given their sequence and precinct numbers in the past few weeks now have useless information in their hands. The bottleneck that was a problem in 2004 will most possibly repeat itself again and may even cause disenfranchisement to OFW,” Balladares warned.
According to Balladares, the process of looking up for the precinct and sequence numbers adds up to the time it takes for an OFW to vote.
Balladares said the precinct “reconfiguration” would complicate matters for 96,000 Filipino voters in Hong Kong who already have to scrimp on just 20 machines.
“This was the reason why many OFWs wanted to know their precincts and sequence numbers in advance – to make voting faster and more convenient. This was also why even Consul-General Claro Cristobal himself urged us to get these numbers prior to voting to make the OAV ‘hassle-free’. They are the ones creating nightmares for us Filipino migrants,” she said.
With the “reconfiguration”, Balladares said that they feel less confident that the OAV will work out smoothly as the COMELEC has vowed in the past.