The Liberal Party (LP) Thursday said it is targeting half a million volunteers to boost their campaign and cover as much ground for their standard bearer Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino and his running mate Sen. Manuel “Mar” Roxas II.

“Right now we are intensifying our volunteer recruitment campaign because we’re targeting to recruit 500,000 volunteers. According to Dinky Soliman we have been able to hit 250,000 volunteers. That’s way below the target, so we are working double time to be able to hit that,” LP campaign manager Florencio “Butch” Abad pointed out.

“Somehow the numbers have not been going up. So the adjustment we are doing there is we are trying to cover as much ground for our two candidates, in fact before the beginning of the campaign for local candidates our objective is to be able to cover at least 50 provinces including the 30 biggest voting provinces and cities. That’s why we’ve been doing this radio and TV hops in different parts of the country,” Abad added.

Despite the shortfall of recruited volunteers, Abad said LP does not have problems about resources to win this election, stressing that they have been able to generate enough support, for example, to finish a decent frequency of ads up to the very end, raising enough resources to support their poll watchers up to the very end.

Abad claimed that “certainly we don’t have that kind of money that Senator Villar has, but we have the resources to come out with radio and TV ads. You must remember that even if Senator Villar has hundreds of millions more to spend, he is covered by the spending limits imposed by Comelec.

When he was allegedly able to spend P1.14 billion by the end of January, and about P142 million between January and February, now he is covered by spending and time limits.

Abad further claimed that it’s Senator Villar who should be worried “because he has practically thrown everything including the kitchen sink and yet he has not even manage to tie, much less get ahead of Aquino in the surveys.”

“This is because of the intensive, relentless and baseless propaganda campaign. You would think that Senator Villar should have already overtaken Noynoy but as it is right now he is still trailing,” Abad claimed.