THE Commission on Elections on Monday urged new voters to register for the upcoming village and youth council elections April this year as only 193,229 have so far registered from January to February 10 this year.
The Comelec has set a target of six million new voters with still 66 days before the barangay and SK elections—two million regular-aged voters, and four million youth.
Filipinos aged 18 years and older may register for the village polls, while those as young as 15 may register to vote for the youth elections.
Comelec data shows that there are 54.363 million active registered voters nationwide.
Comelec spokesman James Jimenez also urged senior high school students to attend its voter education lecture series which already had five sessions since it was piloted last month.
Entitled “#KEBS: Know Elections Better, Superfriends!”, the lecture aims to demystify the process of elections and advocate for an intelligent vote. It is primarily directed at senior high school students who are eligible to register for the SK elections.
“Voters as young as 15 years old should be taught the value of democracy. This lecture is an opportunity for us to urge them to register so they can exercise their right to vote,” Jimenez said.
Voter registration for the Oct. 23, 2017 Barangay and SK Elections is set to end on April 29. But so far there are only 193,229 SK registrants out of the total number of applications received in November and December 2016 nationwide.
Meanwhile, the Comelec said that several measures have been taken up by the poll body to prevent a breach of personal information of registered voters following report of robbery of a desktop computer in Wao, Lanao del Sur, last month that contained the biometrics data of the town voters and the demographics data of all registered voters in the country.
Jimenez said demographic data is the location of the registered voters and not personal data.
Comelec Executive Director Jose Tolentino Jr. said unidentified person broke into the Office of Election Officer in Wao, Lanao del Sur and stole the desktop computer containing the Voter Registration System (VRS), an application used to encode demographic data and capture biometric data of applicant voters.
Also found in the computer were the National List of Registered Voters (NLRV), which contains demographic data of all registered voters in the country, and the Voter Search system, which uses the NLRV to determine if the applicant has already registered.
The VRS contains the detailed personal information of a total of 58,364 registered voters of Wao, Lanao del Sur, of which 40,991 are for registered voters for the upcoming barangay elections as of October 19, 2016 while 17,373 are for the Sangguniang Kabataan elections as of Sept. 13, 2016.
He said the NLRV contains only the demographic data of approximately 75 million registered voters in the country as of Oct. 17, 2016, 55 million of which are active and 20 million are deactivated.
The NLRV does not contain the biometrics data of the national registered voters.