Written by 
Comelec Chairman George Erwin Garcia —INQUIRER.net/Noy Morcoso
MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Elections (Comelec) will not print excess ballots for the 2025 elections, Comelec Chairman George Erwin Garcia said on Saturday.
According to Garcia, the poll body will only print ballots depending on the total population of the registered voters, including the ballots to be used in the overseas voting and the first Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao parliamentary elections.
“We are going to print the ballot one is to one. Meaning, we are not going to overprint the ballots because this is an automated election… Unlike what happened in the past where there will always be excess ballots. Now, we will not print excess ballots,” Garcia said in an ambush interview.
READ: New ballot-printing machines are ‘fully automated’ – HP
Garcia noted that there are about 68 million registered voters nationwide, coming from the election officers nationwide. In a Viber message to the media, Garcia said that 70 million to 71 million of ballots will be printed.
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READ: Comelec targets to start printing ballots by December
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A data released to the media showed that registered voters as of October 26, 2:04 p.m. now stand at 68,571,499 or 99.82 percent of the total reports from electoral board hearings. However, the Comelec said that these data are still subject to validation.
Further, Garcia said that having excess ballots makes the voters wonder where they all go.
READ: Comelec eyes deployment of election materials by March 2025
“Although we have SOP (standard operating procedure) on excess ballots, you can never remove the doubts where these excess ballots go. If we have excess ballots, it creates in the mind of the voters an impression that they can create mistakes [in voting],” Garcia added.
Garcia noted that if a voter does not mean to get their ballot destroyed, the electoral board members will replace it right away. However, he said that there are voters who do it on purpose.
He clarified that the ballots will be “precinct specific” which means that they can’t be used by other precincts and vote counting machines.
Garcia also mentioned that the poll body will start printing ballots in December 2024 until February 2025. He said that the timeline for printing needs to be followed.
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“Aside from the preparatory activities, the most difficult thing is the ship out of election paraphernalia… Ballots are usually the ones we deliver the latest because of security concerns and reason,” he said.