Comelec expects to surpass 2016 polls’ voter turnout

MANILA – The Commission on Elections (Comelec) is expecting to surpass the voter turnout in the May 2016 polls as the election returns (ERs) of the May 9, 2022 national and local elections started to come in.

Lawyer John Rex Laudiangco, Comelec spokesperson, said they are expecting more than 80 percent of registered voters have participated in Monday’s electoral exercise.

“We can see based on the turnout that was reported to us, the queue of people, how early the people arrived, actually the precincts are filled to the brim,” he said in a press briefing Monday evening.

“Historically the voter turnout of the presidential elections is really high so we can’t compare to 2019, the next elections we could compare this to the 2016 elections, voter turnout then was 80.20 something percent, we expect a higher turnout for the 2022 elections,” he added.

He said their projection was based on how they reacted to issues that occurred on election day.

“As to the peace and order situation, yes there are isolated incidents…I don’t know if we could be proud of it. But what we were able to do to differentiate this election from the last one is that our response time was really short, our police and military forces were able to respond to cases of possible election-related violence, but not all of these violence are automatic election-related, these are being validated,” he said.

Meanwhile, Laudiangco said the public may monitor the developments in the transmission of the ERs via the https://2022electionresults.comelec.gov.ph/#/dashboard.

Based on the website, 65.09 percent of the ERs have already been transmitted, as of 9:20 pm.

So far, 69,119 vote-counting machines have already transmitted their electronic ERs, out of the 106,174 clustered precincts.

For overseas, 2.13 percent of the ERs or 30 have already been transmitted to the Comelec. A total of 1,406 ERs are expected to receive.

Under the Comelec canvassing process, the ERs are transmitted to the City/Municipal Board of Canvassers for them to be canvassed. After the canvass at city/municipal level, the Provincial Board of Canvassers will then canvass votes at the provincial level.

The final process of canvassing will be conducted by the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC).