May 13, 2025

The Comelec has a lot of explaining to do with the reported blunder and violations in the midterm elections.

For the first hours of voting period, Kontra Daya and Vote Report PH monitoring center has received verified reports of technical issues with the automated counting machines (ACMs). Some reports document delays of an hour or more due to malfunctioning machines. There are also mismatch of actual votes versus voter verifiable paper audit trail results and overvoting due to slight smudges/markings on the ballot – these resulted in vote disenfranchisement. There is also a noticeable spike in reports of overvoting in this year’s election. Disenfranchisement is also reported with voters still unable to find their names in the list.

On election day, the monitoring center received reports of Illegal campaigning where distribution of campaign materials including sample ballots near polling precincts.

Meanwhile, Filipinos overseas also reported problems and confusion arising from the shift from automated voting system to online voting system (OVS), leaving the overseas Filipinos voters suspicious of possible electoral fraud.

The Comelec also failed to explain the use of unaudited software in the ACM compromising the integrity of the elections. We repeat, version 3.5.0 is not the same with 3.4.0 which has TEC certification.

Instead of addressing these issues, the Comelec dismissed it and claimed that there were no major problems in yesterday’s election.

Still, election day ended with ACM errors topping the list of election violations with 557 reported cases followed by illegal campaign with 142 incidents and disenfranchisement with 86 cases.

We maintain our call for manual voting and counting to ensure that every vote is counted and verified by the public.

We call on the Filipino people to act on these failures of the Comelec to ensure a transparent and honest elections.