Over 17M ballots printed since January: Comelec

MANILA – More than 17 million official ballots to be used in the May polls have so far been printed since the start of the printing process last month, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) reported on Tuesday.

Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said as of Monday, a total of 17,502,631 ballots have been printed out of the 65,721,230 ballots to be printed.

“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 tally work that we need to do,” he said in a virtual press briefing.

The figure represents the ballots for six regions as well as those that will be used for overseas and local absentee voting.

A total of 1,868,798 ballots have been printed for Caraga; 2,298,930 for Zamboanga Peninsula; 3,060,485, Northern Mindanao; 3,236,251, Davao region; 2,606,492, Soccsksargen and 2,588,193 for Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

Meanwhile, 86,280 manual ballots were printed for 63 barangays in North Cotabato that are part of the BARMM.

For overseas voting (OV), a total of 79,080 manual ballots have been printed while a total of 1,618,122 for the OV automated election system (AES).

A total of 60,000 ballots for Local Absentee Voting (LAV) have been printed.

The Comelec started printing ballots on January 21.

Jimenez also said out of the more than 65 million registered voters, a total of 53,795,522 voters are aged 18 to 57.

Those who are 18 to 41 years old are 37,015,901 while those in the 58 to 60 age bracket are 11,925,708.

There are more female voters numbering 33,644,237 as compared to male voters with 32,076,93.

Calabarzon has the most number of voters with 9,192,205 followed by the National Capital Region with 7,301,393.

The region with the least number of voters is the Cordillera Administrative Region with 1,077,900.