Since the overseas voting law was enacted by the Philippine government in 2003, registered overseas Filipino voters have reached over one million.

According to data by the Commission on Elections in Manila, there are 1.37 million registered overseas voters.

Out of this total, 826,880 are new registrants.

Their participation in the May 9 elections in the Philippines could be crucial in determining the winners.

The challenge, however, is to increase actual voter turnout among overseas Filipinos.

During the 2010 elections, the actual number of voters that participated totaled 153,323, which represented only 26 percent of the 589,830 registered absentee voters in 2010.

Overseas voting starts on April 9 and will continue for one month until the May 9 elections.

If they were a province, overseas voters would make it to the list of the country’s top 10 vote-rich provinces, just under Rizal, which has 1.4 million voters, and ranking higher than Iloilo and Nueva Ecija with their 1.34 and 1.3 million voters, respectively

Overseas voters can can vote only for president, vice president, at most 12 senators, and a party-list representative.

Among the registered overseas Filipino voters, 1,326,728 are land-based voters, while 49,339 are seafarers.

They join the 54.4 million registered voters in the country in electing the next set of leaders on May 9.

There were only 737,759 overseas voters in the 2013 midterm elections