THE certified voters’ lists (CVL) for Bacolod City, and some other towns and cities in Negros Occidental that will be used in the May 9 elections have started to arrive in the province, the Commissions on Elections (Comelec) said.
Provincial Elections Supervisor Ian Lee Ananoria said Monday the CVL or master lists of voters came from the Comelec central office in Manila and will be used by the Board of Election Inspectors.
The CVL for other towns and cities are also arriving this week and will soon be distributed to the respective towns and cities.
Aside from the CVL, also expected to be delivered in the coming weeks are the more than 2,500 voting counting machines (VCMs) and official ballots.
Comelec Chairperson Juan Andres Bautista had said last weekend that they completed the printing of the over 56-million ballots in 49 days, exactly one month before the May 9 polls, which is record-breaking.
Bautista noted that the printing of the 56,722,230 ballots was completed last April 7, or 18 days earlier than the target completion which is on April 25.
“It’s the most number of ballots that have been printed in Philippine election history yet we were able to complete the task only 49 days. This is the fastest in automated election history. We were able to do that primarily because we reformatted the ballot and ballots were around 5 to seven inches shorter than the ballots used in 2010 and 2013 polls,” he said in a press conference at the National Printing Office (NPO) in Quezon City.
Ananoria said he will also call for a conference with the Philippine Army and the Philippine National Police shortly for updates on the peace and order situation for the coming national and local elections.
He added that the Provincial Joint Security Coordinating Center will thresh out new developments regarding election-related incidents.
Moreover, Ananoria said he directed the newly-reshuffled election officers to immediately conduct “Oplan Baklas” to remove illegal campaign materials.
During the May 9 elections, Negros Occidental, including Bacolod City, will have 1,663,492 voters.
There will be 742 polling centers all over the province, including Bacolod, located in 662 barangays.
There are 10,907 established precincts. After the clustering, there will be a maximum of 2,556 precincts with a maximum of 800 voters per clustered precincts.
Transmission readiness test
The Comelec will also be conducting transmission readiness test in some parts of the country this month to ensure accurate transmission of results on Election Day.
Bautista said they are already finalizing details on the plan testing.
“We will have this transmission readiness test, which, I think, will happen in the second part of April,” he said.
Bautista noted that the test will also assess Comelec’s readiness to transmit election results in the May 9 polls.
Bautista explained that the areas where the tests will be selected using the data from the site survey conducted by their service provider, Smartmatic International.
“Smartmatic had already conducted a site survey. So we have an idea which sites that have strong signals and which telecommunication provider has a strong signal,” the poll body chief added.
The Comelec is looking to use Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards with satellite-based Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) as the main back-up. (with reports from Sunnex)