Voter, qualification/ disqualification of.

"Velasco's Qualifications/Disqualifications as a Voter

Whether Velasco possesses all the qualifications and none of the disqualifications to register as a voter of Sasmuan, Pampanga is a matter that is not directly before us as his inclusion as a Sasmuan voter is not before us. As the COMELEC did, we rely on the final and executory RTC ruling excluding Velasco from the Sasmuan voters' list. We observe, however, that at the time he filed his application for registration with the COMELEC local office on October 13, 2006, Velasco was a dual citizen. The records show that Velasco renounced his American citizenship only on March 28, 2007,13 although he secured his dual citizenship status as early as July 31, 2006 at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco, California.14 Under his dual citizenship status, he possessed the right to vote in Philippine elections through the absentee voting scheme under Republic Act No. 9189 (the Oversees Absentee Voting Law or the OAVL)15 as we ruled in Nicolas-Lewis v. COMELEC.16 In Macalintal v. COMELEC,17 we significantly said that absentee voters are exempted from the constitutional residency requirement for regular Philippine voters. Thus, the residency requirements we cited above under the VRA and the LGC do not apply to Velasco, assuming he registered as a dual citizen/absentee voter.

By law, however, the right of dual citizens who vote as absentee voters pertains only to the election of national officials, specifically: the president, the vice-president, the senators, and party-list representatives.18 Thus, Velasco was not eligible to vote as an absentee voter in the local election of 2007. In fact, the records do not show that Velasco ever registered as an absentee voter for the 2007 election.19

On the other hand, Velasco could not have registered as a regular voter because he did not possess the residency requirement of one-year stay in the Philippines and six-months stay in the municipality where he proposed to vote at the time of the election. The records show that he arrived in the Philippines only on September 14, 2006 and applied for registration on October 13 of that year20 for the election to be held in May of the following year (2007). To hark back and compare his case to a similar case, Coquilla v. COMELEC,21 Velasco, before acquiring his dual citizenship status, was an American citizen who had lost his residency and domiciliary status in the Philippines; whose sojourn in the Philippines was via a visitor's visa; and who never established permanent residence in the Philippines. Like Coquilla before him, Velasco could not have therefore validly registered as a regular voter eight months before the May 2007 local elections."


G. R. No. 180051, December 24, 2008

NARDO M. VELASCO, petitioner,
vs.
COMMISSION ON ELECTIONS and MOZART P. PANLAQUI, respondents.

https://lawphil.net/judjuris/juri2008/dec2008/gr_180051_2008.html