2025 elections seen as most transparent

ELECTION watchdog Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) is confident that next year’s elections will be one of the country’s most transparent electoral exercises.

“I feel that this election cycle is one of the most transparent. We have been allowed to observe nearly every electoral process,” said PPCRV’s IT Director Director William Yu during The Manila Times-DZRH TownHall.

Yu said the most outstanding feature of the 2025 polls is the online voting system (OVS), the first ever in the country’s election history. The OVS will give all overseas Filipino workers, including seafarers, around the world, the convenience of voting using their cellphones.

In past elections, overseas voters cast their ballots either by mail or voting personally at Philippine embassies or foreign missions.

During the 2022 elections, there were around 1.7 million registered migrant voters spread across 92 Philippine posts overseas.

Comelec spent more than P400 million for overseas voting but the turnout was a disappointing 39 percent.

Yu said PPCRV was still working out ways to monitor the online voting system.

“We have not finalized that yet, this being the first time the system will be used. Even the procedures are actually being drafted for the first time,” he said.

PPCRV has made suggestions, including a biometric check during the voting itself.

Addressing concerns about the absence of paper ballots and printed ERS in the implementation of OVCS, Yu said he expects the Comelec to come up with an alternative means to record the poll results.

“We expect there will be pictographic measures that will be in place to ensure that [we], as observers, get access to people who vote without violating the sanctity of voting,” he said.

Another big feature of the 2025 polls is the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) or voter’s receipts and election returns (ER) QR codes with machine-readable results.

Yu said the VVPAT is useful in doing the random manual audit (RMA) because it eliminates the manual encoding and counting of votes by using a cellphone to scan the QR code for results.

“Instead of encoding results, we scan the QR code and compare it to the printed results and to the automated results. That’s one of the key features we requested to increase transparency for this automated election cycle,” he said.

Yu also said the Comelec would only be successful in regulating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of social media technology during the election campaign if the public cooperates fully.

“This system only works if people actually report the [existence] of fake news, deepfakes, and whatever fakes,” he said.