BAGUIO CITY – The Cordillera office of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC-CAR) reported that the number of registered voters in the region for the May 12, 2025 mid-term elections is 1,111,254 based on the clean list.
COMELEC-CAR regional director lawyer Julius Torres said that the region’s registered voters for next year’s polls is 33,354 more than the 1,077,900 registered voters during the May 9, 2022 synchronized national and local elections.
Benguet recorded the biggest number of registered voters among the region’s six provinces with 418,160 followed by Abra with 190,650 voters, Kalinga – 158,958 voters, Ifugao – 137,602 voters, Mountain Province – 122,042 voters and Apayao – 83,842 voters.
He pointed out that the number of registered voters in Baguio City which is more than 168,000 is included in Benguet’s total voting population.
On the other hand, Torres claimed that the poll body was able to remove from the list of voters those who have not voted for two consecutive elections.
In 2016, The Comelec official said that the region’s voting population decreased to less than one million that included transient voters in Baguio and Benguet.
“We saw a decline in our region’s voting population because we had a lot of students studying in the different parts of the Cordillera, especially in Baguio and Benguet. This is aside from the workers who are not permanent residents but who register here because they work here,” Torres stressed.
He explained that there were those who voted in Baguio and Benguet only once and later on transferred to their places of origin that contributed in the previous decline of the number of registered voters in the different parts of the region.
In a related development, the poll body will be conducting aggressive voters education down to the grassroots level, especially on the use of the new automated counting machines (ACMs), starting next month in preparation for the use of the new machines in next year’s elections.
Torres said that ACMs will be provided down to the municipal level for the voters’ education to ensure that the poll body will be able to inform and educate more voters on the ground to guide them in understanding the use of the machines during the conduct of the elections.
The poll official asserted that the election officers can conduct an information campaign once the ACMs are made available to them to achieve the purpose of educating the voters on the automated elections next year.
Among the new futures of the machine that will be used in next year’s polls are that the machine can show the voter the face of the ballot on a screen and issues a receipt with a quick response (QR) code that will ensure transparency in the process.
Torres added that Mountain Province is among the identified areas where a mock election will be done using the new and updated machine.
“I support this because if there will be a mock election, I want it done in places where there have been recorded problems on transmission, power, transportation and distance so that we can already see the situation and possibly remedy issues that may arise during the election,” he said.
Despite these challenges the region is the first and the fastest to transmit a result to the server during the 2022 election.
“Our farthest voting center, in Talipugo, municipality of Tineg in Abra, can be reached by trekking for two to three days, that is why we usually request air assets for these areas to allow logistics to reach the destination on time,” he said.
Torres added that election officers in the region will do their best to prevent the possible declaration of failure of election in their respective areas and to return all the election paraphernalia to the provincial centers on time. By Dexter A. See
