Comelec wants law mandating civil registry to turn over death records to poll body

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Wednesday called on Congress to pass a law mandating the Office of the Civil Registry to turn over death certificates to the poll body for free to speed up cleansing of voters' registration.

Comelec chairman George Garcia made the response when asked by Senator Risa Hontiveros as to how he intends to address individuals who register as voters in multiple local government units.

Garcia lamented that under existing laws, it is difficult to update the list of registered voters in real time because a registered voter in a particular area, in Camarines Sur for example, could die in the City of Manila.

In such a situation, Garcia said the Office of the Civil Registry in Manila will not include the name of the deceased person from Camarines Sur when it submits the list of persons who died to the local Comelec office quarterly. This is because the person died while registered as voter of Camarines Sur, not of the City of Manila.

"We want to get this information from the Office of the Civil Registrar, but they cannot give it to us without a fee because it is their mandate to issue certification. If we have to pay P5 to get the record of each deceased person, if there are 500,000 who died, we would have to pay P2.5 million," Garcia said during the deliberations of the Commission on Appointments on his nomination as Comelec chair.

"We don't have that resources. We want to enter a MOA (memorandum of agreement with them), but it can only happen if we pay the fee. Kaya po sana magkaroon ng legislation para [makuha namin iyong records na] walang bayad at ma-trace namin agad ang mga namatay," Garcia added.

(That is why we are hoping that there will be legislation so we can get the records without having to pay a fee and we could immediately trace the record of the deceased.)

Garcia, however, said the Comelec has the Automatic Fingerprint Information System in place which enables voting precincts to determine if a voter will be casting his or her vote more than once.

Likewise, he said the Comelec has spent at least P2.9 billion since 2019 to beef up security of voters' data and such investment yielded impressive results.

"From 25,000 attempts to hack our system in the 2019 elections, it increased to 35,000 attempts in 2022 and these all failed," Garcia said. —KG, GMA News