MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Elections is eyeing the start of ballot printing for the 2025 midterm elections by December, following the timeline for the filing of certificates of candidacy this October.
“Hopefully, we can start printing by the second week of December since there will no longer be any candidate substitutions. Once the candidacy is filed from October 1-8, changes can only occur if the candidate dies or is disqualified,” Comelec Chairman George Garcia said in Filipino in an interview Thursday.
According to the commissioner, the earlier filing of candidacies is meant to allow the Comelec to print the ballots earlier as well.
In automated elections, the names of the candidates are already printed, unlike in manual elections where voters write the names of the candidates.
At the same time, the Comelec is “committed” to resolving all nuisance cases before the end of November, which includes delisting candidates who file their COCs but was not accepted by the commission.
The poll body said that, similar to previous elections, nuisance candidates delay the commission’s ballot printing since some bring their cases to court, resulting in halted printing.
“Just like before, there have been instances where the Supreme Court issues a temporary restraining order (TRO) or stops the Comelec, requiring certain names to be included… Hopefully, those situations can be avoided because what happened before was that the TRO would come out while the ballots were already being printed,” he said.
Garcia added that, unlike in previous elections, the ballots for the 2025 elections will have “secret markings” and be “precinct-specific,” meaning ballots cannot be used by other precincts or vote-counting machines since each ballot is intended for a specific machine.
The election system provider for next year’s elections is the South Korean firm Miru Systems. This will be the first time the Comelec uses a new automated election system provider after Smartmatic disqualification.
Miru Systems recently delivered 8,640 units of automated counting machines. So far, over 24,000 automated counting machines have been delivered out of the 110,000 to be used for the 2025 elections.
