'Casting tests' advised for OFs ahead of elections

Certainly, the 1,891,690 overseas Filipinos (OFs), enrolled at the Philippines’ Commission on Elections’ (Comelec) Certified List of Overseas Voters (CLOV), for the April 13 to May 12 General/Midterm Elections, are going to be enrolled for the first-ever online voting.

- Mariecar Jara-Puyod

This reporter is a witness. By 3:30pm of April 3 (Wednesday) and after a few tries, she already accomplished her first test run of digitally shading and ultimately casting her vote for her chosen five senatorial candidates (maximum is 12), out of the alphabetically-arranged 64 contestants and her most preferred one party-list contestant, out of 156 contenders. Paragraphs though are crucial for the enrollment, accomplished over the official ov.comelec.gov.ph/enroll link, which Comelec released to 77 of the 91 Philippine diplomatic and consular posts, on March 29.

For the 1,891,690 registered voters across the UAE, they must spend time verifying their CLOV inclusion at the CLOV links embedded within the Philippine Embassy-Abu Dhabi or Philippine Consulate General-Dubai (PCGDXB) portals over www.gov.ph.

The CLOVs are of 2,351 pages and 4,411 pages respectively. This reporter, with the use of her camera-enabled mobile phone and with her original valid Philippine passport, logged in for the enrollment over comelec.gov.ph/enroll, late evening of April 1 (Tuesday).

Other “valid ID” documents are the Seaman’s Book, Philippine Identification System Number, and Driver’s License.