THERE should be an explanation to the improbability discovered by Institute for Political and Electoral Reform president Etta Rosales in the Taguig voters’ list.

The list has 691 voters aged more than 100 years old – 624 of them born in 1901 (621 of the 624 had the same birth date, Jan. 1, 1901).

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But that’s better than in that joke, which has some basis in real life, about the dead spending time out of the cemetery to vote.

Computer glitch

Taguig Comelec officials have come up with at least two less sinister possibilities: computer glitch and erroneous encoding.

Comelec said that the computer default’s birth date is Jan. 1, 1901, so registrants who failed to write down their actual birth dates got the Jan. 1, 1901 default date.

At least for the computer literate, that’s understandable.

Of course there could be other explanations, some of them related to the attempts of some people to cheat, but one can only be certain about it after Comelec has conducted its investigation.

But whatever will come out of the probe won’t erase the worries about the ballyhooed computerization of the elections.

Are those vote-counting machines, for example, computer glitch-free?

Cheating

The Taguig experience should prod election watchdogs and political groups to examine more closely the voters’ list in the various Comelec offices in Cebu City and Province.

The vote count and registration of voters may have been computerized to increase the believability of the canvassing stage of the elections but that does not mean cheaters can’t resort to other means to tamper with the poll results.

Cheating in various forms has long been hounding every step of the country’s election process from registration of voters to the campaign period, to voting day down to the canvassing of ballots.

That won’t go away fully despite the automation of the election.

Indeed, the problem of flying voters, which manifests itself during the voting stage of the electoral process, starts at the first level, which is the registration of voters.

It helps, therefore, if those concerned focus on this problem now that Comelec is finalizing the list of voters.