Koko: Senate to hold biometrics registration

Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III today said the Senate will hold a mobile biometrics capturing and registration to enable Senate employees registered in their respective provinces to have their data captured and taken as required by law.

Pimentel, chairman of the Senate Committee on Electoral Reforms and People's Participation, and co-chair of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on the Automated Elections System, said the Commission on Elections (Comelec) would conduct the mobile registration.

He said he would also request the Comelec to allow members of the Senate media beat to use the occasion to have their own biometrics taken because many of them have no time to go home to their respective provinces.

The Comelec said some four million qualified voters for the 2016 national and local elections still have no biometrics data, referring to the automated identification that includes a picture, fingerprints and signature on a voter's data.

One of them is no less than the new Comelec chairman himself, lawyer Andres Bautista, who had earlier confided that he still did not have his biometrics data.

Pimentel said some Senate employees, who are registered either in the Visayas or Mindanao, have yet to undergo the biometrics data registration as a requirement of the automation election law so that they would not be "deactivated" as registered voters in their hometowns.

Pimentel said the biometrics registration, mandated by Republic Act 10367 or the Mandatory Biometrics Registration Act, is aimed at cleansing the voters' list of ghost voters, otherwise those who have failed to undergo the procedure would be barred from voting in 2016.

The Comelec has already partnered with large mall owners and operators to help qualified voters to register their respective biometrics data, among them the Ayala Malls, Robinsons Galleria and the SM Malls across the country.