Many offices of the Commission on Elections in the towns and cities of Negros Occidental are having difficulty coping with the flood of people wanting to register to vote with the deadline only three days away.

The registration period began in May 2011 but it is only in recent weeks that people have been flooding COMELEC offices, Provincial Elections Officer Jessie Suarez said yesterday.

The COMELEC will accept applications for registration to vote only until 3 p.m. of Wednesday, he said.

COMELEC Resolution 9542 states that if, at 3 p.m. Wednesday, there are still persons waiting in line to file their applications for registration within 30 meter radius from the Office of the Elections Officer, the Election Assistant will, without delay, list down their names numbered consecutively, Suarez said.

These names will be called by announcing each name repeatedly three times in the order in which they are listed. Any applicant who is not present when his name is called will no longer be allowed to file his application for registration, Suarez said.

Any application filed without biometrics will be deemed not filed and will not be submitted to the Election Registration Board for hearing, he added.

Bacolod Election Officer Mavil Majarucon-Sia said they are registering voters at the Bacolod Arts and Youth Sports Center to accommodate the huge influx of registrants who have been coming in lately.

Sia said there are hundreds of people wanting to register who flock to BAYS Center daily.

Their machines can only handle about 600 registrants a day and by about 10 a.m. they already have that many waiting in line, she said.

To complete the registration and biometrics of the 600 registrants 15 Bacolod COMELEC personnel whose working hours are supposed to end at 5 p.m. have been working until to 6 to 7 p.m. without any overtime pay, she said.

Some people who refuse to accept that the COMELEC machines can only cope with so many applicants a day sometimes even shout at and threaten COMELEC personnel who are already overworked and trying to cope, she said.

“We have been registering since May 2011. For more than a year already, I've been appealing to everybody to please register early and avoid the rush,” Sia said. Now that there is a heavy influx of registrants some who cannot be accommodated immediately bad mouth COMELEC personnel, she added.

Meanwhile, COMELEC chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. is asking the pubic to monitor national and local candidates who might take advantage of All Saints and All Souls Day by putting up streamers and tarpaulins in cemeteries.

“What the people should do is to document the scenes by taking pictures of those who would take advantage of the occasion,” he said.

“It’s always a problem because they can always take advantage of such fact that there’s no premature campaigning. We don’t have a law,” Brillantes said.

However, he appealed to the conscience of the possible candidates.*CPG

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