Printing of ballots hits a snag over Miriam party

Printing of ballots for the May 9, 2016 national elections at the National Printing Office (NPO) temporarily stopped yesterday after it was noticed that the name of presidential aspirant Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago did not include her political party, the People's Reform Party.

“There was a problem with the entry name of Sen. Miriam so we decided to have it corrected first before it can be given the go-signal,” Genevieve Guevarra, Comelec, Printing Committee head, said.

An official of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) clarified that what was stopped was the printing of the ballots that will be used for the Final Testing and Sealing (FTS).

Guevarra said only 39 ballots for the FTS were printed when they noticed the problem in the ballot face. She said they expect the corrected ballot faces to arrive yesterday from the Comelec warehouse in Sta. Rosa, Laguna.

“We expect it to arrive this afternoon or tonight (Wednesday) from Laguna so we can already push through with the ballot printing for the overseas voting,” said Guevarra.

She said what is being printed now at the NPO are the demo ballots.

“There was a request for us to produce 750,000 demo ballots. These are the ballots that do not contain the real names of the official candidates,” Guevarra said.

The poll body is printing 56.7 million ballots for the May 2016 polls, which include those that will be used for local and overseas absentee voting, and the training ballots for the final testing and sealing, and PreLat (Preliminary Logic and Accuracy Test).

This does not include the ballots that will be used for manual elections for local and overseas absentee voting totaling 223,611. The printing of these were already completed last February 12.