April 30, 2025

Kontra Daya and several migrant groups received numerous reports about the problems with the ongoing online voting system.

According to them, the Comelec and other concerned government agencies have not done enough to disseminate information about the shift from manual and automated voting to purely online voting system for the 2025 midterm elections.

“Posting about it on the consulate/embassy website and their Facebook pages is not enough. They did not even try to use other means to communicate this major change to our kababayans overseas,” said a migrant worker from Australia.

This situation has resulted in many overseas Filipinos being caught off-guard with the new system. “Many overseas Filipinos thought that they still had to wait for their ballots to vote. We are not even sure if most are aware of the May 7 deadline for pre-registration,” said a migrant from Canada.

Reports also showed that overseas Filipinos experienced technical issues during the actual online voting such as an average of 15 minutes needed for enrollment, broken hyperlinks, freezing or restarting of the voting page and problems with the uploading their IDs.

Aside from these, overseas Filipinos are complaining that they do not have a way to verify their votes with the online system. “The Comelec should immediately address these issues to prevent more votes from being disenfranchised. Should these issues remain unresolved, these will only lead to bigger problems and increase the risk of election fraud,” said Danilo Arao, convenor of Kontra Daya.

He stressed that Comelec should have offered options for the overseas Filipinos to encourage the latter to vote, especially if the registration rate is low. However, its inadequate preparation and slow action threatens to further disenfranchise them. Internet voting was intended to improve the roughly 1.2 million overseas Filipinos’ participation in the elections but Comelec has turned it into a tool that could prevent them from exercising their right to vote. ###