Comelec holds ballot placement raffle for party-list groups

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) is set to conduct a raffle today to determine the number or the place of the party-list organizations in the official ballots for the May 2019 polls.

According to Comelec spokesman James Jimenez, they will no longer use a “lottery drum” as the raffle will be automated.

The Comelec will display the alphabetical listing of all party-list groups on a projector screen and a commissioner will initiate the automated raffle, he said.

The groups that will not send a representative during the raffle will have to settle for the alphabetical listing, which will come after the raffled list.

Jimenez said the poll body started conducting the raffle in 2013 “to counter-act the tendency of voters not to go through the entire list and just choose from the first few names” on the official ballots.

“This practice has led, in the past, to party-list groups coming up with all sorts of names starting with the letter A or the numeral 1, in ever more ridiculous attempts to appear high up on the list – this, in turn, tended to trivialize the party-list system,” he said.