The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has printed six million ballots for the 2025 midterm polls, and they are all headed to the trash bin.
It’s an expensive waste of paper. With each ballot pegged at P22, the estimated funding lost due to reprinting is P13.2 million — a small amount in the grand scheme of election preparations, but definitely not cheap for the average Filipino. That figure does not include the Comelec’s payment to the National Printing Office (NPO) for the first week of botched operations.
So how did we get here, and who’s at fault?
Printing of ballots
The poll body began printing the ballots on January 6. The Supreme Court was aware of this, because Comelec Chairman George Garcia sent Supreme Court Chief Justice Alexander Gesmundo a letter on January 3, notifying the latter about the start of such operations at the NPO.
The Supreme Court was even aware that the printing of ballots could have commenced earlier. In Garcia’s correspondence with Gesmundo on August 1, 2024, he noted that the landmark pre-election activity could start third week of December.
What’s with the need to inform the Supreme Court about these dates? It’s because the Comelec needs to make sure that the names on the ballot are final, as sometimes, the Supreme Court intervenes to stop the Comelec from excluding some names.
For the 2025 elections, 183 aspirants tried to join the senatorial race, but in the end, the Comelec identified only 66 legitimate candidates. The rest are nuisance.
In one particular case, the Comelec en banc declared a certain Subair Guinthum Mustapha a nuisance candidate on November 29, denying his motion for reconsideration.
The 1993 Comelec Rules of Procedure, which is still the poll body’s bible for internal legal processes, states that a decision of the Comelec in special actions and special cases becomes final and executory after five days from its promulgation “unless restrained by the Supreme Court.” The rules do not give the High Court a time limit to act on the petitions filed with them.
With no intervention from the gods of Padre Faura, the Comelec confidently removed Mustapha’s name on the ballots, which the poll body started printing on January 6.
Belated TRO
But on January 14, the Supreme Court issued various TROs in favor of five candidates who knocked on its doors, which means their names should be on the ballot, but they were not on the ones that were being printed beginning January 6. Among those who secured a TRO was Mustapha, who filed his request with the Supreme Court on December 3, 2024.
The repercussion is significant. Garcia said the Comelec has no choice but to abide by the ruling, so the poll body immediately halted operations at the NPO. The next day, the Comelec ordered that six million ballots be destroyed and properly disposed of.
“This is the first time in our electoral history that the Comelec will order the reprinting, back to zero, of the actual ballots as compliance with the order of the Supreme Court,” Garcia added.
While the Comelec guaranteed it is on top of the situation, and that the elections will push through as scheduled on May 12, the TRO effectively delays the commission’s election preparation timeline. To make up for lost time, the poll body will have to start using other machines in the NPO.
Similar to 2022
In the past, the Comelec, under the leadership of Garcia’s predecessor Sheriff Abas, also faced similar problems.
For the 2022 elections, the Comelec started printing automated ballots on January 23 that year. It did not include the names of two national elective aspirants it had declared as nuisance — namely, Norman Marquez and Wilson Amad — even though the two secured TROs from the Supreme Court on January 19 and 20, 2022.
The Abas-led Comelec had said the serialization of the ballots had been completed when the High Court intervened, so it could no longer change the ballot faces to accommodate Marquez and Amad.
In September 2022, the Supreme Court nullified the Comelec’s declaration of Marquez as a nuisance candidate, and in November, held some Comelec officials in contempt for violating the TRO issued in favor of Amad.
The problem with the Abas-led Comelec, as the Supreme Court pointed out in Amad vs Comelec, was the slow turnaround time on cases.
“The Court observes that, in several instances, candidates who face disqualification cases or suits for their declaration as nuisance candidates, are rendered moot because their cases remain pending even after the conclusion of the national and local elections,” the 2022 ruling read.
“To prevent similar situations to occur in the future, the Comelec must resolve with dispatch all cases pending before it, in accordance with the prescribed periods provided in the Comelec Rules of Procedure,” it added.
In fairness to the Comelec, petitions against all nuisance candidates had been resolved at the en banc level by the time it released its final list of candidates on December 13, 2024. The Supreme Court had a sufficient amount of time to stop the Comelec from excluding names on the ballot.
In Amad vs Comelec, the Supreme Court also compelled the Comelec to “publish its schedule of events, including its pre-election activities, to inform the public, particularly interested parties who seek to challenge the Comelec’s rulings.”
“The Court, too, was left unaware of the Comelec’s timeline of events and pre-election activities. Plain and simple, while the Court was in the process of reviewing the records and resolving the cases, including applications for TRO, with urgency, the Comelec’s acts rendered these cases moot,” the Supreme Court said in 2022.
That’s definitely not the case for the 2025 elections, since the Comelec wrote to the Supreme Court about its election preparation timeline.
So when the Supreme Court granted Mustapha’s TRO request earlier this week, was it fully aware that the consequence would be the discarding of millions of ballots, and delays in pre-election preparations? – Rappler.com