MANILA — A week before the start of the overseas absentee voting (OAV), an election watchdog group on Friday urged Philippine posts and embassies to double time their efforts in encouraging Filipinos overseas to participate in the forthcoming polls.
In a Facebook post, the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE) said that Philippine officials should launch last minute information campaigns to properly educate Pilipinos abroad.
“As overseas voting is about to start, we would like to request that our embassies all over the world work doubly hard to reach out and communicate to our overseas voters,” it added.
The group believes that the information drive would help address possible reservations of Filipinos in participating in the May 2019 elections.
“Such communication would greatly appease the fears and apprehensions of our voters as to the integrity of the process. This way also, disinformation would be corrected right away,” it said.
The group revealed that they received information that several Filipinos in Singapore are concerned that their votes will not be counted since they are not the ones that will insert their accomplished ballots into the vote counting machines.
“Such concern was brought about by the lack of communication to them of the change in their mode of voting,” said LENTE.
Data from the Comelec- Office for Overseas Voting (OFOV) show that there is a total of 1,822,173 overseas absentee voters.
There are various modes in casting their votes under the OAV, automated voting using the vote counting machines (VCMs), manual voting through posting and personal voting.
Filipinos abroad are only selecting candidates for national positions, 12 senators and one party-list group.
The OAV period will be from April 13 to May 13.