The Commission on Elections urged Congress in a resolution on Tuesday to fast-track a law that would allow residents in the restive Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao to vote ahead of the May 10 nationwide balloting.
“The Comission resolved… to urge both Houses of Congress to immediately pass the Early Voting Bills; provided that elections will be conducted not later than April 12, 2010, in the ARMM and only for one day,” the four-page resolution said.
The Constitution provides that local and national elections be held on the same date.
Comelec officials said only a new law could enable the poll body to set a date ahead of the scheduled national and local elections in the ARMM. The region is composed of the predominantly Muslim provinces of Basilan (except Isabela City), Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, and Marawi City.
The Comelec said there were three pending bills in Congress seeking to ease election management problems.
One of the measures, House Bill No. 3437, aims “to uphold the vote of every voter and not disenfranchise the voters due to perceived rampant electoral fraud and also to minimize if not totally diminish electoral violence.”
The Comelec has been calling for separate balloting in the ARMM, which has a long history of election cheating and violence as in many other places in the Philippines, in order to concentrate its security and administrative forces there.
The call was repeated following the election-related massacre of 57 people in Maguindanao on Nov. 23, the worst election violence in the country’s history.
Recently, lawyers Macabangkit Lanto, a former justice undersecretary, and Benjamin Lanto filed a petition in the Comelec to set the elections in ARMM on April 12 instead of May 10.
“The electoral history of the areas of the ARMM will show that there was not a single election held in the area which was not tainted with irregularities and all forms of poll frauds,” they said in their petition
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