The Commission on Elections is trying to improve its voter identification system by using new technologies like face and voice recognition and iris scanners.
Comelec Chairman George Garcia made the suggestion at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay forum on Wednesday. He stressed the need for a general registration, which he thinks will solve the problem of double and multiple registrations.
The head of the Comelec asked Congress to think about a general registration, which would basically throw out the current national list of voters and make a new one.
He also said that the planned upgrade to the Comelec’s ID system would cost around P2 billion.
But Garcia made it clear that this new method wouldn’t help if the current list of voters wasn’t thrown out.
Recently, the Comelec has been cleaning up the list of voters because it found that hundreds of thousands of people had signed up more than once.
As of July 18, Rex Laudiangco, a spokesman for Comelec, said that 457,899 voter registrations have been removed or canceled.
Of that number, 294,186 were marked as double or multiple registrations, 155,408 were voters who had already moved to another city or municipality, 178 had not voted in two regular elections in a row, 2,480 had already died, and 2,566 had double or multiple records at the city or municipality level.
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