WHEN the current voter-registration period started in May 2014, the number of people without biometrics stood at 9.6 million. Today there are still 4.7 million people left who have not had their biometrics registered with the Commission on Elections (Comelec). These people need to get themselves validated.
Why validate? Obviously, the most important thing is that you won’t be able to vote in 2016, unless you have your biometrics in the system. And if you’re already a registered voter, the only way to make sure that your biometrics are in the the system (as they ought to be) is to have yourself validated.
Section 7 of Republic Act 10367 provides: “Voters who fail to submit for validation on or before the last day of filing of application for registration for purposes of the May 2016 elections shall be deactivated pursuant to this Act.” Of course, a person who has been “deactivated” remains on the list of voters, but he will not be able to vote. So, it won’t matter if you’ve been a regular voter, or even if you voted in the last elections. If you don’t validate before the deadline, you will not be able to vote in 2016. Truly no bio, no boto.
Apart from that, though, you can also think of validation as one way of making a personal contribution to the improvement of Philippine elections.
One of the pillars of successful elections is a clean list of voters, and a clean list of voters is exactly what validation will produce. Validation, via biometrics, will ensure that each person has only one voter record. Multiple registrations—which cause bloated lists of voters, which, in turn, are used to mask vote fraud perpetrated by having people casting votes multiple times using multiple identities—will be eliminated. Flying voters, in other words, will become extinct.
In case you haven’t been paying attention to these kinds of things for a while, biometrics simply refer to those physical attributes which set one person apart from everyone else. No one looks exactly like you, and no one has the exact same set of fingerprints that you do, except in the case of identical twins, but even then, the chances of a perfect match are too small to really worry about. Also, for the most part, no one can sign your name exactly the way you do—not even identical twins. Which is why when we speak of biometrics, we refer to your face, digitally photographed; your fingerprints, digitally taken; and your signature, directly captured by a computer via a signature pad.
Leveraging this fact that there are physical attributes that make you virtually unique, the Comelec’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS)—and, yes, that’s the same AFIS you hear about on crime shows on television—compares your records against all other biometric records in the database, searching for a match.
If a fingerprint match is found, that means you’ve registered as a voter two or more times. Your picture and signature provide added confirmation. Since the Comelec started implementing biometrics matching in the early 2000’s, there have been numerous records revealed to feature the same person—both men and women—registered under different names, sporting different hairstyles and wearing different clothes, all in an apparent effort to get on the list of voters as different people.
If it were not for AFIS, which was made possible by the gathering of biometrics, these nimrods would have been able to vote more than once.
As an additional bonus, the Comelec’s validation drive will also result in the elimination of the names of deceased voters from the list. This means that the “votes” of these dead voters can no longer be used to conceal fraud, and that, hopefully, we can finally let all those cemetery jokes rest in peace.
So, even if you don’t care to vote, you still should consider validating in order to help make the system better for everyone else.
Keep in mind that in the National Capital Region and in highly urbanized cities, Comelec offices are open for validation from Sunday to Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. In other cities and municipalities throughout the country, validation is from Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Validation can also be done during satellite registrations, as may be announced by the local Comelec conducting the satellite registration.
You also need to be aware that the last day for validation is on October 31, 2015; that a person may only submit for validation at the local Comelec office where he registered to vote; and that a person does not need to present any identification in order to get himself validated.
As the advocacy group Lente once quipped: “Voting is like love. It needs validation.” True story.
James Jimenez is the spokesman of the Commission on Elections.