Monday, April 02, 2007 Poll exec lauded for purge of 20T flying voters
SENATE Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. commended a field election supervisor in Cagayan de Oro City who cracked down on bogus voters in the city.
Pimentel praised Cagayan de Oro Election Registrar Stalin Baguio for cleansing the voters list of about 20,000 flying voters.
Pimentel, who hails from Cagayan de Oro, said the existence of a huge number of flying voters has been the bane of the electoral process in the city for a long-time now but it was only Baguio who seized the initiative in striking them out from the list of registered and qualified voters.
The lawmaker said he himself personally verified and confirmed the existence of 20,000 flying voters and double registrants in the records of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) city office during the weeks preceding the May 2001 elections.
He said there were even some teenagers who came forward and admitted that they were able to register as flying voters in Cagayan de Oro although they were residents of different towns of Misamis Oriental and nearby provinces like Lanao del Norte and Bukidnon.
He said the self-confessed flying voters even signified their willingness to testify before the Comelec or the Senate to reveal the truth behind the scam.
Pimentel said the admission of thousands of flying voters into the roster of qualified voters could not have been made possible without the connivance of corrupt Comelec officials with unscrupulous politicians and their political operators.
He said the investigation and purging of the fake and flying voters from the official list were foiled by highly placed Comelec officials both in Northern Mindanao and Manila, who were probably part of the election fraud syndicate responsible for the anomaly.
"That is why we are saying that election registrar Stalin Baguio achieved quite a feat in de-listing 20,000 flying voters from the official roster. This is a good example of sanitizing the voters list of spurious registrants which can be replicated in other areas," Pimentel said.
The opposition leader also voiced suspicion that some Cagayan de Oro political leaders had something to do with the listing of the flying voters which gave them an undue advantage over their opponents in past elections, enabling them to entrench themselves in power even if they no longer enjoyed the trust of majority of their constituents. (CPB/Sunnex)
