Delayed OAV registration blamed for poor turnout

MANILA, Philippines - A migrant group owed the low turnout of overseas absentee voting registrants (OAV) in the Middle East to the delayed and unfavorable registration timing set out by some Philippine posts.

Migrante blamed the government's late registration opening for the poor OAV turnout in the Middle East, the top destination region of Filipino workers. The OAV registration started last Feb. 1 and is expected to gather a million registrants by August 31, 2009.

"How could we expect the OAV registration result to be good in the Middle East when in fact some RP posts have just opened up the registration a few week back and set up an unfavorable registration timing?" asked John Leonard Monterona, Migrante-Middle East regional coordinator.

Monterona said the Philippine Embassy in Qatar had just announced the start of registration on March 5, while the Philippine Consulate office in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates had started only last February 17; two to three weeks delayed from the start of OAV registration.

"The late opening of registration by some RP posts in the Middle East is coupled with registration timings which are not favorable to OFWs who are working 6 days a week, with only Fridays as their day off," Monterona added.

Monterona said both RP posts in Doha and in Dubai announced the OAV registration would start at 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Sundays to Thursdays until August.

"These posts failed to take into consideration that Fridays, as the official non-working holiday in most of Middle Eastern countries, [is a time ] when fellow OFWs normally have a freer time as this is their day off, thus they could go to their respective embassies and consular offices for registration," Monterona said.

Filipinos in the United States are the top registrants for overseas absentee voting (OAV) in the first month since the registration opened.

As of Friday, a total of 3,791 Filipinos registered in Philippine posts in the US, according to data from the Department of Foreign Affairs’ (DFA) OAV Secretariat.

But a big disappointment is the Middle East, host to more than two million Filipino workers and dependents. Though it had the biggest number of registrants in 2003 and 2006, only 1,649 new Filipinos have so far registered in the oil-rich region since March 13.

In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), only 524 Filipinos have so far registered. There are about 1.2 million Filipinos in KSA.

Other Middle Eastern cities did not fare any better.

The top 10 cities with the most number of Filipino registrants are Riyadh (KSA), Tel Aviv (Israel), Kuwait City (Kuwait), Abu Dhabi (UAE), Jeddah (KSA), Amman (Jordan), Manama (Bahrain), Muscat (Oman), Tripoli (Libya), and Doha (Qatar).

The number of registrants in these cities range from 382 to 24.

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