The Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the Department of Foreign Affairs-Overseas Voting Secretariat (DFA-OVS), in partnership with the Philippine Embassy in Abu Dhabi, conducted the sixth leg of their information drive on internet voting, a first in the country’s electoral history that will be implemented in the upcoming midterm elections next year.
The two-day event, held on October 25-26, served as pilot training for the Middle East and Africa region. The Day 1 was attended by personnel from nine Philippine missions, including those in Abu Dhabi and Dubai (UAE), Riyadh and Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Damascus (Syria), Tel Aviv (Israel), Tripoli (Libya), Rabat (Morocco), and Abuja (Nigeria).
In addition, over 50 Filipino community and organization leaders based in Abu Dhabi participated in the second day of the training.
“This will be the biggest change in further empowering our overseas Filipinos thus far since overseas voting began in 2004,” said Philippine Ambassador to the UAE His Excellency Alfonso A. Ver in his remarks. “By enabling their right to vote through a more modern voting system, we further advance the most concrete and most compelling recognition of their contribution and influence in shaping not just our next set of leaders and governance for the next three years, but of our collective pursuit of nation-building.”
He, along with Comelec Commissioner Marlon Casquejo, engaged with the participants during the Open Forum segments of the two-day training and information drive.
Jesus S. Domingo, DFA Undersecretary for Civilian Security & Consular Affairs, emphasized that online voting aims to make it more convenient for overseas Filipinos to exercise their right to vote.
“We have over 12 million Filipinos overseas, but in the last election, we only had slightly over 600,000 voters. Hopefully with the internet voting, mas madali na,” he told The Filipino Times on the sidelines of an AI and digitalization summit for Filipino architects and engineers taking place in Abu Dhabi today, October 27.
“We’re placing the maximum effort in making sure that our voting process is secure, from ID, transmission and so on. We’ve learned a lot over the years and are upgrading accordingly. But we are confident that the process will be very secure for online voting,” he said, adding that the next training and information drive on online voting will be held in two weeks in Vancouver, Canada for North America.
