Philippines COMELEC Overseas Voter Registration (OVF No. 1, via iRehistro Online Application-Form Generator)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-06

Every field in this schema was read directly from the served HTML DOM of COMELEC's own public, unauthenticated iRehistro web tool (irehistro.comelec.gov.ph), and cross-checked against the official gazetted OVF No. 1 (Revised 2025) PDF form fetched directly from COMELEC's own site. It remains draft, not verified, pending an independent second reviewer's field-by-field pass.

Why this document exists

This GovSchema Standard Research cycle (GOV-1457) was pointed at several remaining voter-registration gaps by prior cycles' own notes: the UAE has no general voter-registration process (likely N/A, not attempted this cycle), Brazil's TSE electoral register is suspended 2026-05-07 through 2026-11-03 (confirmed dead end by GOV-1400, not re-attempted), and Mexico's INE credencial para votar requires an in-person biometric appointment (flagged as likely weak, not attempted this cycle in favor of a stronger candidate). The Philippines — which opened as the registry's 17th jurisdiction one cycle earlier (GOV-1444) with only one schema (ph/bir/tin-application-corporations-partnerships, Business Formation) — was flagged as "untested this cycle" for voter registration and picked as the strongest remaining candidate. The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) publishes iRehistro for Overseas Voters, a public, unauthenticated web tool that walks an applicant through the exact fields of OVF No. 1 (Revised 2025) and generates a printable, QR-coded PDF of the completed form — a live-wizard sourcing shape this registry has used successfully before (e.g. us/fl/miami-dade/clerk/marriage-license-preapplication, mx/inm/forma-migratoria-multiple-electronica). This adds the Philippines' second vertical (National ID & Civic Documents) and closes this registry's last realistically-sourceable voter-registration gap this cycle.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): ph/comelec/overseas-voter-registration / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: Commission on Elections (COMELEC), Republic of the Philippines
• Primary source (directly retrieved, HTTP 200, full DOM read): https://irehistro.comelec.gov.ph/ — "iRehistro for Overseas Voters" (version 5.2.2.1). Note: comelec.gov.ph's own root domain returns a Cloudflare interstitial challenge ("Just a moment...", HTTP 403) to a plain curl fetch from this environment, but the irehistro.comelec.gov.ph subdomain that hosts the actual application-form generator tool is directly reachable with a realistic browser User-Agent — no login, CAPTCHA, or WAF gate on the wizard page itself. The wizard's own submission step requires a Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA (cf-turnstile-response), which is not modeled as a schema field (see "Explicitly out of scope" below), consistent with this registry's established treatment of CAPTCHA gates.
• Corroborating source #1 (directly retrieved, HTTP 200, genuine text layer, extracted with pdfjs-dist 4.10.38): https://www.comelec.gov.ph/php-tpls-attachments/OverseasVoting/2028NLE_OV_RegForms/AnnexA_OVF1_v5_A4.pdf — OVF No. 1 (Revised 2025), the official gazetted 2-page form, fetched directly from comelec.gov.ph's own attachment path even though the site's root/browsable pages are Cloudflare-gated (the direct attachment path was not gated). Used to confirm the wizard's DOM fields correspond verbatim to the form's own Parts I and II, and to read the form's other application types, and Parts III/IV/V (out of scope — see below).
• Corroborating source #2 (directly retrieved, HTTP 200, documentary requirements): https://philippine-embassy.de/overseas-voting/ — the Philippine Embassy in Berlin's own official "Overseas Voting — Registration Requirements and Procedures" page (a Philippine foreign-service-post government page), citing COMELEC Resolution No. and the blank PDF form do not themselves enumerate which physical identity/supporting documents must accompany the printed OVF1 at submission).
  1. Used exclusively to source the documents[] array (the wizard
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-06
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

Extraction method

1. Fetched irehistro.comelec.gov.ph directly via curl with a realistic browser User-Agent (HTTP 200, ~146KB HTML, no redirect, no bot mitigation encountered).
2. Read the full served HTML directly: every <input>/<select> name attribute, every <label> and <option> text, every maxlength attribute, every help-block hint, and — critically — the page's own inline <script> containing its client-side validateForm({...}) call (invoked on the "Review Application to be Generated" button), which lists every field name alongside its own required/optional status and type (text/select/email/date/captcha). This inline validator call is the authoritative source for this schema's required: true/false assignments (e.g. it confirmed resiaddr2 ["Address Line 2"] is required, even though its <label> carries no visible asterisk in the rendered form — a discrepancy resolved in favor of the validator, the stronger signal).
3. Extracted the three large <select> option lists (resictry — 247 countries/territories, leaveabdprv — 88 provinces/NCR districts, ovnameext — 12 suffixes) programmatically via a script that parsed every <option value="...">...</option> pair, to guarantee no entries were dropped or mistyped by hand-transcription.
4. Fetched the official OVF No. 1 (Revised 2025) PDF directly and extracted its text layer with pdfjs-dist (getTextContent, version 4.10.38 — this environment did not require the 3.11.174 pin noted by earlier cycles for this particular PDF). Confirmed the wizard's six on-screen sections (Personal Information, Residence Abroad, Local Voter Registration, Contact Details, Authorized Representative in the Philippines, Review and Generate Application) correspond to the form's Part I ("PERSONAL INFORMATION OF THE APPLICANT", including the residence-abroad and local-registration blocks) and Part II ("AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE OF THE APPLICANT IN THE PHILIPPINES").
5. Fetched the Philippine Embassy in Berlin's official registration- requirements page directly (HTTP 200) and read its "REQUIREMENTS FOR FILING AN APPLICATION FOR REGISTRATION/CERTIFICATION" section verbatim to source documents[].

What was confirmed directly (verbatim, from the sources' own text/DOM)

• The wizard's six-section structure and every field name/label/maxlength pair listed in fields[]'s own sourceRef values.
• The full 6-option statusAbroad checkbox/select list and its dependent conditional fields: otherStatusAbroadDescription (shown only when Status Abroad = OTHERS) and the two documents gated on statusAbroad (Seafarer's proof, Dual Citizenship certificate).
• The isPhilippinePassportValid → passportValidUntil and isRegisteredVoterInPhilippines → registeredProvinceOrDistrict/ registeredCityMunicipality conditional-field pairs, both directly observed via the DOM's style="display:none;" containers (ovpportcont, ovrcont) that are toggled by the corresponding gating field's change handler.
• The citizenship field's blocking behavior: selecting NON-FILIPINO triggers a dialog ("Non-Filipinos cannot submit an application.") and the tool's own JavaScript immediately resets the field back to FILIPINO ($("#citizenship").val("FILIPINO");) — modeled here via fieldRole: "eligibility" / eligibleValues: ["FILIPINO"] rather than narrowing the enum itself, since NON-FILIPINO remains a reachable, well-formed selection on the live control.
• The OVF No. 1 form's other seven application types (Certification, Reactivation, Reinstatement, Change of Address, Recapture of Biometrics, Transfer between Posts/Countries, Correction of Entry/Change of Name), read directly from the PDF's "APPLICATION FOR:" checkbox group (Part I) — confirmed absent from the live iRehistro DOM (no applicationType-like control, no matching field names anywhere in the page's HTML or its validateForm call), so this tool generates a Registration-type OVF1 only. This document therefore models the Registration application type exclusively.
• The documentary requirements in documents[]: a valid Philippine passport (data page + one photocopy) as the default identity document; in its absence, a Post-issued Certification; for a Seafarer, a Seaman's Book or other proof; for a Dual Citizen, a Dual Citizenship Certificate or Order of Approval (original + one photocopy) — all read verbatim from the Berlin Embassy's own numbered requirements list. Personal appearance/ biometrics capture is mentioned on the same source ("Personal appearance is required, since the registrant will need to provide their biometrics.") but is a process step, not a document, and is not modeled as a documents[] entry.

Interpretive judgment calls disclosed

1. Registration application type only. iRehistro's DOM only ever collects the fields needed to generate a Registration-type OVF1; the form's other seven application types are out of scope for this v1.0.0 (see above). A future version could model these as a applicationType discriminator field if a source exposing their own additional fields (e.g. COMELEC's Virtual Frontline Services portal, mentioned by the Berlin Embassy page for Transfer/Reactivation/Reinstatement/Change of Address/Correction filings by already-registered overseas voters) is found and reviewed.
2. registeredCityMunicipality modeled as an open string, not an enum. The live tool populates this field's own <select> option list dynamically via a server-side AJAX call (POST muns-prov, prv=<selected province code>) once a province is chosen; the full, closed per-province city/municipality list is therefore not enumerable from the page's static HTML alone without walking all 88 province/district values through that AJAX endpoint — deferred to a future cycle rather than guessed at.
3. dateOfBirth's 18-years-by-election-day cutoff not modeled as a static validation.maximum. The live tool's client-side validator currently hardcodes this cutoff as 05/08/2010 (i.e. the next scheduled election date), which necessarily moves with each election cycle. Baking today's cutoff into a versioned schema would silently go stale; documented instead as a business rule in the field's own description.
4. citizenship modeled via fieldRole: eligibility / eligibleValues, not a narrowed enum. See "What was confirmed directly" above — NON-FILIPINO is a reachable but ineligible selection on the live control, which is exactly the shape GSP-0018's eligibleValues mechanism exists for.
5. CAPTCHA excluded. The wizard's final "Review and Generate Application" step requires solving a Cloudflare Turnstile challenge (cf-turnstile-response) before the tool will render the PDF. Consistent with this registry's established convention, this is not modeled as a schema field.
6. Country/province enums use the source's own display-text values, not internal numeric/alpha codes. residenceCountry (247 entries) and registeredProvinceOrDistrict (88 entries) are modeled using the <option> elements' visible label text (e.g. "AFGHANISTAN", "NCR - 1st DISTRICT (Manila)"), not the underlying value attributes (ISO-ish country codes; internal province numeric codes) the tool itself submits — the same convention already established by nl/denhaag/voter-registration-abroad's 247-entry country enum, since a consuming agent has no independent way to resolve COMELEC's internal numeric province codes without a further, unpublished lookup table.
7. Parts III, IV, and V of OVF No. 1 out of scope. Part III (the oath and the applicant's/Election Officer's signatures) is executed in person, not a data-entry field; Part IV ("TO BE ACCOMPLISHED BY THE VRMO") and Part V (Resident Election Registration Board action) are office-use-only sections never exposed to the applicant by iRehistro.
8. In-country (domestic) voter registration not modeled. COMELEC's domestic registration process is a separate, in-person, biometric- capture process with no equivalent public online wizard found this cycle — a distinct, not-yet-sourced candidate for a future cycle, not a dead end.

What is NOT yet independently verified

• No independent second reviewer's field-by-field pass has occurred yet (status remains draft).
• The wizard's generated output PDF itself was not obtained (doing so requires solving the live Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA, which was not attempted, consistent with this registry's boundary against CAPTCHA/ login bypass) — the schema is derived from the intake DOM and the blank gazetted form, not from a rendered sample output.
• COMELEC's Virtual Frontline Services (VFS) portal, mentioned only in passing by the Berlin Embassy's own page as the channel for certain already-registered overseas voters' Transfer/Reactivation/Reinstatement/ Change of Address/Correction filings, was not located or reviewed this cycle.

Candidates rejected or deferred this cycle

• AE (UAE): no general citizen-initiated voter-registration process exists — not attempted, consistent with prior cycles' assessment.
• BR (Brazil): TSE's electoral register remains suspended (2026-05-07 through 2026-11-03), confirmed by GOV-1400 — not re-attempted.
• MX (Mexico): INE's credencial para votar requires an in-person biometric appointment — not attempted this cycle in favor of the stronger Philippines candidate; remains an open backlog candidate, not a dead end.
• PH LTO driver's-licence/vehicle-registration (DMV vertical) and PH PhilSys national-ID Step-1 registration were this cycle's fallback candidates per the task brief, but were not needed once COMELEC's iRehistro tool proved directly reachable and well-sourced — both remain open backlog candidates for the Philippines' remaining verticals (DMV, National ID card itself).