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Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman George Garcia said printing of ballots for the May 2025 polls finish by March and ballot verification by April.

In a press conference, Garcia said we have printed 27 million ballots and we even exceeded our daily target in printing the ballots.

“Ang ating pong pag-print ng balota, more or less, March, tapos [na] kami. Mga second week going to the third week of March. The most, March 19, tapos kami sa printing, basta magtuloy-tuloy ang performance ng anim na makina,” Garcia added.

While, the ballot verification will take place in April and will have two stages: manual verification of personnel via naked eye and machine verification, he added

The Comelec will have 600 personnel for manual verification while there are 200 machines so far for machine verification.

“Our rule is, if the ballot passes manual verification but does not pass machine verification, that is considered a rejected ballot. But if the ballot was not cleared to go after manual verification, that is already deemed as a rejected ballot. No need for machine verification [at that point],” Garcia said.

“A manual ballot verification takes 7.5 to 8 seconds each, depending on the experience of the verifier. In a day, if you are going to verify from 7 am to 7 pm or 8 am to 5 pm, you will be able to verify a lot. But if you’ve noticed, rejected ballots are few and far in between, and most of them were machine-rejected ballots (those deemed ineligible for use after machine verification). So that is why we said we’ll be done by April 14, meaning we will be done with ballot printing and verification by then,” Garcia added.

Garcia said such meticulous verification of ballots is necessary.

“We have such high standards for the ballots because first and foremost, it is an accountable form. It needs extreme care,” he said.

The Comelec is planning two work shifts in order to speed up the verification process.

“For today, we only have a day shift. But starting tomorrow, maybe we will be able to do night shift [also for ballot verification],” Garcia said.

After ballot verification, the ballots will be placed in vacuum sealed boxes to prevent them from being damaged due to temperature or the environment where these will be stored.

“We are doing this to prevent our past experience wherein certain ballots expanded due to temperature, and as a result, these were rejected by the counting machines,” Garcia explained.