Home 
A person can only assist thrice persons with disability during voting on election day.
Cebu Provincial Election Officer Marco Lionel Castillano said in a roundtable discussion with CEBU DAILY NEWS editors and reporters that a person with disability can vote in automated elections with the help of a relative and a member of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI).
Any blood relative up to the fourth degree can help the voter with disability fill out his ballot.
But to prevent voter manipulation, Castillano said a person can only assist a maximum of three persons.
In contrast, BEI members can help unlimited number of voters.
To ensure that the assistant will only help out thrice, we will put indelible ink on his fingernails starting at the pinkie finger, said Castillano.
If the pinkie finger, ring finger and middle fingernail all have indelible ink, this would mean that the assistant had reached the maximum.
A marked right forefinger indicates that a person has already cast his vote.
Forms of assistance include helping the voter find a candidate's name on the ballot, shading the oval next to the candidate's name, and feeding the ballot to the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine.
Castillano said the indelible ink will last for three days on the fingernails.
He said the Commission on Elections (Comelec) en banc will increase the concentration of silver nitrate in the indelible ink solution from 5 to 20 percent to ensure that it will not be easily removed.
?It will not be easy to take off the ink because the silver nitrate content will be increased. The ink will last three days on your fingernails,? he said in Cebuano.
This May, about 2.4 million voters both from Cebu City and Cebu Province will be voting in 3,065 polling precincts.
