A year of imprisonment and one-year suspension of the right to vote await some 200,000 multiple registrants in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), Commission on Elections Chairperson Benjamin Abalos said Thursday. The Comelec has removed from its list of voters the names of qualified voters who enlisted more than once during the 10-day general registration of voters in the five-province ARMM, Abalos also said. "We have to do this because they were aware that registering more than once could mean revocation of their right to participate in balloting and imprisonment," Abalos told a radio station here. Left on the Comelec sists are only about 981,000 qualified ARMM voters for next year's national and local elections, he said. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo directed the Comelec to act on the multiple-registration of voters "with a high sense of urgency and resoluteness ... (because) "the country has had enough of election fraud."
| I thought it was a national tradition? |
Most of the ARMM "flying voters" were underage, Abalos said. Some used different photographs and different names, "but fingerprints do not lie," he said. Some others enlisted again outside ARMM, Comelec investigation revealed. For instance, several Maguindanao residents also registered in Cotabato City. |