Ballots for May elections ready by mid-April

THE PRINTING of ballots for the 2019 National and Local Elections (NLE) will be finished before the Holy Week begins on April 14, which is earlier than the target date, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) announced on Wednesday. “Latest data from the Printing Committee show that 38,347,754 ballots have been printed as of March 19, 2019. This represents 60.24% of the 63,662,481 total number of ballots to be printed,” Comelec said. Around one million ballots are being printed daily by the National Printing Office (NPO). Additional ballots are also being printed at the NPO, which Comelec said “will be used for the Final Testing and Sealing (FTS) process, while the rest are demonstration ballots allotted for vote-counting machine (VCM) road show and demonstration purposes.” — Gillian M. Cortez