An official of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Monday said Commissioner Socorro Inting will take over as acting chair of the poll body come February 3, unless President Rodrigo Duterte appoints a new chief.
“Commissioner Socorro Inting, most senior Comm on Feb 3, will be Acting Chair @COMELEC while PRRD has not appointed a Chair,” Commissioner Rowena Guanzon said in a Twitter post.
Comelec chairperson Sheriff Abas, along with Commissioners Guanzon and Antonio Kho, are all retiring on Feb. 2.
This will leave the poll body with only four Commissioners—Inting, Marlon Casquejo, Aimee Ferolino, and Rey Bulay—all of whom are Duterte appointees.
Abas and Guanzon were appointed as commissioners by the late former President Benigno Aquino III in 2015.
In 2017, Duterte named Abas as head of the poll body, replacing Andres Bautista who resigned from the post.
Kho, a former Department of Justice undersecretary, was appointed by Duterte to the poll body in 2018.
Meanwhile, Comelec on Monday said the start of the printing of the official ballots for this year’s elections was “way earlier” than the schedule followed for the similar procedure during the 2019 polls.
“We are happy that we started in the second half of January much earlier than in 2019 when the printing started sometime in February. We are hoping with this early start or timely start, we could have a buffer for probable contingencies,” Comelec printing committee vice chair Helen Aguila-Flores said.
She said Comelec is looking to finish the printing of the more than 67 million ballots by the third week of April.
“Our target is to finish the printing of all official ballots on April 21,” Flores said.
The poll body started the printing process last Thursday for 60,000 local absentee voting (LAV) ballots.
It is also done with the printing of around 79,000 ballots for overseas voters and some 86,000 ballots for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).
The Comelec will be printing a total of 67,442,714 ballots for the May 9 polls, of which 1,697,202 are for overseas voting.