‘Extend voter’s registration for persons with disabilities’
-A A +AFriday, August 3, 2012
A PROGRESSIVE lawmaker recently urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to consider persons with disabilities (PWDs) and give them a week’s time in their conduct of voter’s registration for the 2013 mid-term elections.
Representative Teddy Casiño of Bayan Muna made the appeal to give more opportunities for PWDs to participate considering their physical limitations.
In a statement, Casiño said it would be much better if the special registration for PWDs be held in one week to ensure as much participation as possible.
Casiño is the primary author of House Bill 4048 or Polling Center Accessibility Act of 2011, which was already approved as House Bill 5509 on third reading.
“We are also appealing to the Senate to pass the counterpart bill so that PWDs, senior citizens and expectant mothers will instead be assigned to special voting rooms on election day. Their ballots will be collected on basis of their actual assigned precincts and will later be forwarded to the corresponding precincts,” Casiño said.
In Cagayan de Oro, Milagros Maquiling, president of the Cagayan de Oro Federation of Persons with Disabilities Association Inc. (Cafedpa), said more than 1,500 members of PWDs in Cagayan de Oro alone are eager and waiting to be included in the scheduled special registration for PWDs that was postponed twice in lieu of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (Armm) registration last month.
Maquiling earlier expressed dismay over the seeming lack of attention given to them by Comelec in allowing them to exercise their right to participate in next year’s election.
More than 1,500 members of Cafedpa out of the 3,000 active members already reached the voting age and have not yet registered in the city.
“There are many PWDs that have already reached voting age but are unable to participate in the regular schedule of registration due to their condition,” Maquiling said.
Lawyer Dolette Cuevas Banzon, Comelec assistant regional director, said they have already set August 11 as the tentative schedule for the PWDs.
Banzon said the postponement was necessary because of the conduct of general registration in the Armm. (Abigail Chee Kee Malalis)
Published in the Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro newspaper on August 03, 2012.
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