Taguig City Mayor Sigfrido Tinga Wednesday called on the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to investigate  and take immediate action on the reported registration and inclusion of more than 600 centenarians in the city’s official voters’ list.

Tinga said the city government is validating the complaint. Once found to be true, he said they will request the Comelec to invalidate and strike out the dubious names from the voters’ lists.

The anomaly was exposed by Institute for Political and Electoral Reforms president and former Akbayan party-list Rep. Etta Rosales who cited a “curious” record of 691 centennial voters, or citizens who are aged more than 100 years old, in Taguig’s Comelec records.

Rosales said a total of 691 centenarians appeared in the Taguig list, 624 of which were born in 1901, while 621 of them shared a common January1 birthday.

Tinga said that on Tuesday, the city government together with a television network crew verified the existence of some centenarians in Rosales’ list, including a certain Rosalyn Ricafort Galvez, an alleged 127-year-old voter from Block 32, Lot 47 in Sunflower St., Western Bicutan.

The team failed to find Galvez in the registered address.

The team also verified a certain Belinda Sala of 21-D Ambal St. in Western Bicutan, who was allegedly born on January 1, 1901, and learned that Sala, who is only in her late 40s, had already transferred to Pasig City several years ago.

Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said although the poll body is already investigating the matter, they are not discounting the possibility that it may be due to a computer or encoding error.

“It could be anything from a computer error or possibly an encoding error. But it doesn’t look malicious right now,” he said in a press briefing. “Kung makikita mo kasi ‘yung kanilang common birth date it’s January 1, 1901. It’s 111. So mukha talaga siyang computer error,” Jimenez said.

He said there’s a need to find out first if those people in the list actually looked they are centenarians.

“What we need to do is to find out if these people actually looked like they are 100-years old. If they don’t look like they are 100-years old then obviously something is wrong. But either way we are already looking into the problem,” Jimenez said.

Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal, for his part, urged those who may have similar complaints to bring them to the attention of the election registration board (ERB).

“There’s a hearing of the ERB on Nov. 1. You can complain before the ERB and you can question there the application or registration,” he said.

However, Tinga argued that applications for registration with incomplete basic information, such as birth date and year of birth, should not have been validated and registered in the first place.

“Should the irregularity prove to be a technical or computer error, it would only show how haphazard the registration and voter listing processes have been. We have questioned time and again the registration process here in Taguig, where illegal registrants have been allowed into the voters’ lists,” the mayor said.