Comelec: Gov’t execs nominated by party-list should resign, too

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) yesterday said government appointees who will be chosen as nominees of party-list groups participating in the May 10 polls should also resign from their posts.

Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said the resignation of government officials who are nominees of party-list organizations is provided under Resolution 8697, which was issued by the poll body last November 11.

“The commission issued Resolution 8697 providing that nominees of the political party organizations will be considered ipso facto resigned from their appointive offices upon acceptance of their nomination,” he said.

Larrazabal said the Comelec will know the identities of the party-list groups’ nominees as the organizations are ordered to submit to the poll body a list of their nominees.

Each organization is given a maximum of five nominees. The deadline for the filing of nominees is on March 26.

With this, Larrazabal advised the organizations to immediately submit their nominees and strictly follow the deadline.

After the last day of the filing, the Comelec will publish the names of the organizations, including their acronyms and nominees.

Larrzabal, however, clarified that a nominee who has not yet accepted his nomination by a particular group is not required to resign.

“Unless they accepted the nomination, they are not considered nominees of the party-list organization and they are not required to resign,” he said.

Although there are 187 party-list groups listed on the official ballots, they are not all accredited to join the polls since some of them have pending cases before the poll body.

Larrazabal said the Comelec will release an official list of those who were accredited along with those that were not accredited.

Asked if voters could reject a party-list nominee, he said anyone can file an opposition before the Comelec.

Related significantly with the forthcoming elections, the Comelec also yesterday said the last batch of the Precinct Count Optical Scan machines to be used in the May 10 national and local polls will be arriving in Manila today, a day before the deadline set by the poll body.

Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said the 13,580 machines are set to arrive in two batches – 7,200 machines around 6 a.m. and the remaining 6,380 units an hour after.

A total of 82,200 machines were manufactured by the consortium of Smartmatic-Total Information Management to be utilized in the forthcoming first-ever automated elections in the country.

Of this number, some 77,000 of the machines will be deployed in the clustered precincts all over the country.

The spare units, meanwhile, will be used as back-up in case the other machines experienced a malfunction.

The machines will count, canvass and transmit the results of the May polls to the Comelec central office in Manila.

This is the first time the Comelec will undertake automated elections, a project that costs P7.3 billion.

If the automated process fails, the poll body is prepared to revert back to the “slower” traditional manual method of elections and canvassing of votes, which is said to be more prone to cheating. –Marie A. Surbano, Daily Tribune