BAGUIO CITY – The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) explained that no priority polling precinct will be established in the city because there is no compelling reason or demand from the concerned sectors for this May 12, 2025 mid-term elections.
City Election Officer lawyer John Paul Martin said that there was no member of the vulnerable sectors who availed of the emergency accessible polling precincts (EAPPs) that had been used during the May 9, 2022 elections because the senior citizens, person with disabilities (PWDs) and pregnant women preferred to cast their votes in their designated clustered precincts.
He claimed that the members of the vulnerable sectors informed election officers during a post-election interview then that they prefer to cast their votes in the designated clustered precincts located in the various polling centers in the city because they want to personally feed their ballots to the vote counting machines (VCMs), now known as the automated counting machines (ACMs).
The COMELEC official pointed out that the senior citizens, PWDs and pregnant women who go to the polling centers to cast their votes to go to their designated clustered precincts to vote even if these precincts are situated in the upper floors of the centers as they prefer to feed their ballots to the VCMs to ensure that their votes are counted in favor of the candidates of their choice.
Under the EAPPs and now known as the priority polling precinct (PPP), members of the vulnerable sectors can cast their votes by shading the numbers of the candidates of their choice in the ballots but they are not the ones to feed their filled ballots to the ACMs as this the task of an assigned support staff in coordination with the members of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) in charge of the clustered precincts where they are supposed to vote.
According to him, senior citizens, PWDs and pregnant women can still enjoy the convenience of casting their votes because of the early voting time slot on election day be from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. and they personally will be the ones to feed their vote to the ACMs.
Martin underscored that ‘voting is not only our right, it is our power.’ By Dexter A. See
