Up to 4M defective ballots up for reprinting – Comelec

MANILA, Philippines — Up to four million ballots for midterm polls are set to be reprinted, Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairman George Erwin Garcia said on Monday.

Garcia, quickly clarified that the Comelec will not pay for these defective ballots.

“Comelec only pays for good ballots,” Garcia said in an ambush interview at Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas event where it deposited the Automated Election System source code for midterm polls.

READ: Comelec transfers 2025 elections source codes to BSP

Garcia noted that the defects of these ballots were manually checked by their verifiers.

READ: Comelec completes printing of 68.5M ballots

The Comelec already completed the printing of 68,542,564 official ballots, taking the poll body 48 days before meeting its March 15 deadline.

Garcia, however, noted that 40 percent of them have yet to be verified. Thus, he said the number of defective ballots will surely increase.