MANILA, Philippines – The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has already purged from its voter rolls for the 2022 elections the names of 755,769 registered voters who have passed away, the poll body said on Thursday, March 31.

The number covers records the Comelec has canceled by reason of death from August 2019 to October 2021.

But Commissioner George Garcia appealed to relatives of their deceased loved ones to inform the poll body about the deaths in order to speed up the Comelec’s process of deleting their names from voter rolls.

The Comelec currently relies on the data from local civil registrars, which are required to submit to local election officers a list of residents who have died.

The problem, however, occurs if an individual died not in the city or town they were registered as a voter.

“For example, we do not expect the civil registrar of Manila to issue a certification addressed to the election officer of Nueva Ecija,” Garcia explained during Thursday’s press briefing.

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Garcia said the Comelec tried asking the Philippine Statistics Authority to submit to the main Comelec office a complete list of deceased individuals, so that the poll body can, in turn, send the names to its field offices. 

“The problem is, that needs legislation. Number two, we will be charged with a huge amount which I won’t disclose, and we don’t have a budget for that,” Garcia added in Filipino.

“We appeal to the families, especially if your loved one died not in the area where they were registered, it would be good to help the Comelec. If you can provide us a death certificate of your deceased relative, we will remove them from our lists,” he added.

The Comelec, in 2021, acknowledged the possibility that the names of people who died of COVID-19 may plague the poll body’s list of voters in the 2022 elections.

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Comelec spokesman James Jimenez had warned that the presence of deceased people on voter rolls may be a “nuance that will be lost on the public.”

In the Philippines, the public has become wary of “ghost voters,” amid fears they are being used by political camps to favor certain candidates.

Purging “ghost voters” from the voter roll has been the Comelec’s perennial headache every election season. – Rappler.com