Despite initial delays in its ballot-printing target last month, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said the National Printing Office (NPO) was already able to print 17 million ballots for the May 2022 elections.
This is already around 26 percent of the total 67.4 million ballots to be printed by the poll body for the forthcoming electoral exercise.
“As you can see we have quite a way to go, but it’s also very important to note that this is already a significant chunk of the total work that we need to do,” Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said in an online media briefing on Tuesday.
Among those printed are the 60,000 ballots to be used for local absentee voting (LAV) and the 2,588,193 million to be used for the polls in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).
The state-run NPO was also able to complete the printing of the 79,080 manual ballots and 1,618,122 automated election system (AES) ballots to be used for overseas voting.
It also successfully printed the 86,280 manual ballots for the 63 barangays in North Cotabato.
The rest of the printed ballots will be used for Caraga Region (1,868,798), Regions 12 (2,606,492), 11 (3,236,251), 10 (3,060,485), and 9 (2,298,930).
The printing of the ballots was supposed to start on January 17, but it deferred it to January 20 due to the pending release of the final ballot faces as well as the election cases of some of the aspiring candidates.
Comelec earlier said NPO is expected to finish the printing of 67.4 million ballots for the 2022 polls by April 21, 2022.