Politicians aspiring to join the 2010 polls will have until midnight of December 1 to file their certificates of candidacy (COCs), the elections chief announced on Tuesday.

The Commission of Elections (Comelec) is extending for a day the list-up of candidates, from the national down to the local levels, because the original deadline, November 30, is a non-working holiday.

Poll chief Jose Melo said that the Comelec will accept COCs beginning November 20 to December 1. 

He said that the during the filing period, Comelec will be open even during weekends and holidays.

Melo said that the extended voters' registration “opened our eyes to another probable budding problem in our deadline for the filing of application of candidacy on November 30.” 

He said that many voting-age citizens who failed to register before the deadline on October 31 thought that the registration was moved until the following Tuesday.

Even officers in some field units of the Comelec which were not affected by the typhoon thought that the voters’ registration had been extended.

He, however, clarified, through an en banc resolution on Tuesday, that the Comelec will just continue to process the biometrics of voters who filed their registration before midnight of October 31.

As for the candidates’ list-up, he said that there will be no more extension after December 1, since the poll body have to consider a period to hear disqualification petitions against nuisance candidates.

“We have to decide on those [disqualification] cases within a period of one month only—December to early January. And there will be Christmas holidays during that time,” he said. (Newsbreak)