THE Commission on Elections on Friday announced the postponement of the release of the final list of 2019 candidates to give it more time to resolve pending disqualification cases.
In a statement, Comelec spokesperson James B. Jimenez said they moved the release date for the list from Dec. 15 to next week, to “allow pending issues related to several candidacies to be settled, without negatively impacting the final contents of the 2019 ballot.
Comelec issued the announcement a few hours after it rushed the completion of the “trusted build,” the process wherein the parts of the internationally reviewed source code are assembled, of the Election Management System (EMS) in Alabama, the United States.
The poll body opted to hold the trusted build of the EMS separately from the two other components of their automated election system–Vote Counting Machines (VCM) and Consolidation and Canvassing System (CCS)–in anticipation of the release of the final list of 2019 candidates on Saturday.
The EMS, Jimenez explained, automatically collects voter information like their numbers nationwide; where they are registered; and location of their precincts.
Comelec said the immediate completion of the trusted build of the EMS is necessary since it will determine the number of the precinct-specific ballots they will be printing starting on the first week of January 2019.
“We started with the [trusted build of the EMS] first because we need it for the loading of the data…our timeline says we have to have the [voters’] data before the end of December,” Comelec Commissioner Marlon S. Casquejo said in a press conference livestreamed from Facebook.
Casquejo together with other government officials, were still in the US on Friday overseeing the trusted build of the EMS.
The Comelec executive said ideally, the completion of the trusted build for the EMS was supposed to coincide with that of the VCM, and CCS here in the Philippines on January 7, 2019 to make the process as transparent and open to the public as possible.
Casquejo will be back in the country next week to turn over the copies of the trusted build of the EMS to the Comelec Project Management Office (PMO), which will be storing the same for use in next year’s election.
He said a copy of the EMS trusted build will also later be put on escrow at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) at a still unspecified date pursuant to the provisions of Republic 9369 or the Automated Election Law.
Among the high-profile candidates with pending questions on their qualifications to run in the 2019 national and local elections are incumbent Senators Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel, Loren Legarda, and former senators like Sergio “Serge” Osmeña III, and Alan Peter Cayetano.
Jimenez, however, assured the delay will have no “adverse” impact on their preparations for the 2019 elections.
As of Friday, the poll official said their list of candidates was already “cleaned” of candidates, whom the Comelec en banc have declared as “nuisance.”
The tentative list contains the names of about 34,000 candidates vying for the 18,094 posts in the 2019 polls.