The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Monday said the start of the printing of the official ballots for this year’s elections was “way earlier” than the schedule followed for the similar procedure during the 2019 polls.

“We are happy that we started in the second half of January much earlier than in 2019 when the printing started sometime in February. We are hoping with this early start or timely start, we could have a buffer for probable contingencies,” Comelec printing committee vice chair Helen Aguila-Flores said during the livestreamed printing activities at the National Printing Office (NPO) in Quezon City.

At the same time, she reiterated that they are looking to finish the printing of the more than 67 million ballots third week of April.

“But our target is to finish the printing of all official ballots on April 21,” Flores said.

The poll body started the printing process last Thursday, wherein they printed around 60,000 local absentee voting (LAV) ballots.

They are also done with the printing of around 79,000 ballots for overseas voters and some 86,000 ballots for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

“Printing of official ballots already ongoing. Actually, we are already more or less into our 4th day today because on January 20 we already successfully started the printing of the LAV manual ballot and on January 21 we also started with the printing of overseas manual ballot. Yesterday (Sunday) we started the printing of AES (automated election system) ballot for the BARMM,” she added.

The Comelec will be printing a total of 67,442,714 ballots for the May 2022 polls.

The number of ballots to be printed for local voting is 65,745,512 and another 1,697,202 ballots for overseas voting. (PNA)