Comelec posts ‘promising’ 52% online voting test run turnout

MANILA – An official of the Office for Overseas Voting (OFOV) of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Monday reported over 52 percent voters’ participation in the internet voting test run.

OFOV Director Sonia Bea Wee-Lozada said 52.01 percent or 348 of the 669 qualified test voters participated in the online voting from 8 a.m. of Sept. 11 to 8 a.m. on Sept. 13.

She said the figure is promising since OFOV has never reached 50 percent turnout during the actual polls.

“This is for me, for someone who has looked at the historical figures for overseas voting in the Philippines, this looks promising because traditionally, we never go beyond 50 percent when it comes to voters actually voted for overseas voting,” Lozada said in a virtual press briefing.

“Historically, it’s always been below 40 percent… hopefully we can get the same numbers as well for 2022,” she added.

The initial test run for internet voting involving Filipinos abroad was conducted using the mobile voting solutions of Voatz.

Asked what was their assessment of the activity, Lozada said they cannot give an assessment since the event has just been finished.

“Because we just ended at 8 a.m., we are still actually in the process of gathering all feedback and putting them together. It is something that we will be including in our report to Congress. All test voting activities would lead to written reports,” she said.

Two other service providers namely: Smartmatic and Indra Sistemas will also be conducting test runs of their internet voting systems within the month.