Comelec eyes completion of vote canvassing within this week

MANILA — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) is looking to finish this week the canvassing of all 167 certificates of canvass (COCs) from Monday’s mid-term elections.

Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez noted that the formal proclamation of winners in the national polls is not possible within the week.

“We expect to finish everything within the week but the formal proclamation may not be this week because there are a lot of invites (to do). But we will know the results very soon,” Jimenez said in an interview on Wednesday.

Prior to the scheduled proclamation of new national officials, the Comelec usually sends invitations to government officials, and families of the newly-elected politicians among others, asking for their presence in this momentous event.

Jimenez reiterated his earlier statement that they would like to collectively proclaim all the 12 new senators of the country.

“That is our goal because in the past, we proclaim the first six. It will be like during the 2016 polls where we proclaimed all of them in one occasion,” he said.

At the same time, the poll body official reported that as of Tuesday evening, the Comelec en banc, sitting as the National Board of Canvassers (NBOC), has canvassed 34 COCs or 24 percent of the total number of COCs to be canvassed.

Of the 167 COCs, 130 are from automated polls in local and overseas, 34 representing manual elections overseas, and one each from local absentee voting (LAV) and detainee voting.

Meanwhile, data from the poll body’s Election and Barangay Affairs Department show that 366 municipalities, out of the more than 1,000, have already proclaimed local winners.

They are from the Cordillera, Ilocos, Eastern Visayas, Calabarzon, Cagayan Valley, Soccsksargen, Central Luzon, and Davao regions.

The other regions have yet to submit a report on the proclamation of winners at the local level.