“Printing of ballots” will be finished “within the week,” Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said at a press briefing on Monday.

This was confirmed by Cesar Flores, president of the Asian office of Smartmatic, the company contracted by the Comelec to print ballots and supply poll machines.

Smartmatic will be able to finish ballot printing by April 23 or 24 because it was able to meet its target of printing a million ballots a day in the past few weeks.

As of Monday, 46.860 million of the more than 50 million ballots to be used in the May polls have already been printed, Larrazabal said.

Earlier, the Comelec brought a fifth Kodak printer to the National Printing Office in Quezon City — where the ballots are being printed — to speed up the process.

The Comelec plans to invite the media and the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on Poll Automation on the day when the last ballot rolls out of the printer, Larrazabal added. (PIA-Bohol)

Atty. Eliseo Z. Labarya, Provincial Elections Supervisor, declares that they have started to pull-out old records of voters. Labarya says that there will be an increase of voters by 10% this 2010 than the number of voters for the Barangay And Sannguniang Kabataan (SK) elections last October 2007. He adds that the direct voting and counting machine used in the ARMM elections is suggested by COMELEC for the elections here for faster results.