Commission Elections (COMELEC) spokesman James Jimenez said the additional ballots were for new voters who registered during the 25-day continuing registration held last November 2017 and also for voters of Mindanao in Southern Philippines.
The printing of the new ballots for Mindanao, he explained, was necessitated by a recent ruling of the COMELEC en banc that the synchronized village and youth elections will push through as scheduled in the whole of Mindanao, except Marawi City (Lanao del Sur), in spite of the one-year extension of martial law in the whole of Mindanao.
On September 5, 2017, the COMELEC en banc suspended the twin polls in the whole of Mindanao because of the Marawi crisis, which forced President Duterte to impose military rule in the region.
With the suspension, no ballots were printed for the entire Mindanao area.
The scheduled October 2017 elections were eventually postponed to May 2018.
The printing of the 18-million new ballots started February 15.
The National Printing Office is capable of printing 800,000 ballots a day and up to one million at optimum capacity.
The COMELEC will use the already printed October 23, 2017, as the date of the elections.
The ballots and accountable and non-accountable forms being printed for the Mindanao region, however, will bear May 14, 2018, as the date of the elections.
Earlier, Oriental Mindoro Representative Reynaldo Umali said he had already filed a bill seeking to again postpone the village and SK polls this May to coincide with the planned plebiscite for the proposed Constitution for a federal form of government. [William Dipasupil, The Manila Times]
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