MANILA, Philippines – The Commission on Elections (Comelec) clarified on Thursday, March 17, that only 105,350 of the 49.7 million ballots printed so far for the 2022 elections were spoiled and had to be replaced, not 5.2 million as earlier reported by the poll body.

On Thursday, the Comelec said the 5.2 million ballots reported as “defective” during the Comelec’s in-person walkthrough of the National Printing Office on Tuesday, March 15, were actually just ballots temporarily “set aside,” for fear that they had issues.

Those ballots underwent another round of verification, and as it turned out, 3.3 million out of the 5.2 million “suspect” ballots were actually in good quality. Some 1.9 million ballots, meanwhile, were still being re-evaluated.

“If there are 1,000 ballots to be printed, and our printing committee determined that one of them is not a good ballot because it was improperly cut or its color was off, the remaining 999 will have to be set aside,” Garcia explained in Filipino during a press conference.

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Garcia said the Comelec will present to the media in next week’s random inspection of ballots some defective ballots to show they will not be accepted by the vote-counting machines. 

As of Tuesday morning, the poll body has printed 73.7% or 49.7 million ballots out of the 67.4 million ballots that need to be printed for the high-stakes election in May.

Of this number, some 37.4 million ballots, or around 51%, are already ready for shipment, the Comelec said.

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The poll body, through its election supplies forwarder F2 Logistics, is set to deliver the ballots to consignees, mostly city and municipal treasurers, on April 20.

Comelec’s contract with F2 Logistics has, however, drawn scrutiny over its ties to President Rodrigo Duterte’s major 2016 campaign donor, Dennis Uy.

But poll officials have defended the agreement, saying there were no grounds to suggest that conflict of interest was involved. – Rappler.com