Voting in Hong Kong and Singapore opened smoothly at around 8 A.M. Saturday, a Commission on Elections commissioner said. “The [PCOS] machines have already been opened. [The voting process] is [already] starting,” Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said in an interview on radio dzBB. Larrazabal is in Hong Kong, which has 95,355 Filipino absentee voters, to oversee the first day of the OAV. Singapore, on the other hand, has 31,851 voters. “It's all systems go here, and we are excited,” Larrazabal said, adding that the members of the Filipino committee and consulate officials in Hong Kong are assisting voters, who he said have started arriving at the Philippine consulate office there to cast their votes. Larrazabal also assured that elections officials were equipped with UV lamps to be used to authenticate the ballots. “All teachers and volunteers have UV lamps. When we came here to train the officials, mayroon nang UV lamps dito sa Hong Kong. Kumpleto na definitely,” the commissioner said. Reporting from the Bayanihan Kennedy Town Center (BKTC) in Hong Kong, GMA reporter Chino Gaston said the overseas voting was smooth-sailing, with OFWs breezing through what they described as a “fun and simple” automated process. The first Filipino to cast her vote was Rowena de la Cruz, who completed in only a minute and a half the entire process of accomplishing her ballot, feeding it to the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machine, and getting an indelible ink on her finger. Moreover, Gaston said it did not take other OFWs more than three minutes to cast their votes. The voters already had preferred candidates' list, which helped speed up the voting process. While the PCOS machines had a glitch-free run, voting at the BKTC was still not spared from the usual problem of missing names on the voters' list. At least two overseas Filipino workers, including Mark Vincent who had been successful in voting in the last two elections, failed to cast their votes because their names were not on Comelec's list of registered voters in the island state. The consulate in Hong Kong had asked the two to await further notice on how they could cast their votes.
