The number of registered voters for the May 2022 elections has once again exceeded the expectation of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) official count nears the 65-million mark.
In an online town hall forum last Tuesday, Comelec spokesman James Jimenez disclosed they already registered 63 million voters locally and another 1.6 million overseas voters.
“So all in all…you are looking at a voter population of almost 65 million voters. That is a huge percentage of our national population,” Jimenez said.
The number of registered voters is expected to increase further before the deadline of the local voter registration on October 30, 2021.
“There’s still more coming actually and we expect the crowd to be getting larger as we get closer to the deadline,” Jimenez said in a television interview.
Comelec earlier said it only expected to register another 300,000 to 350,000 additional voters after it extended the local voter registration beyond September 30, 2021, due to public clamor.
“But we [now] have around 400,000 new registrants. So the hits just keep coming as they say,” Jimenez said.
Since Comelec started voter registration for the 2022 polls, it has now registered roughly 4.5 million newly registered voters.
“This is incredible considering that this is on a pandemic,” Jimenez said.