THE National Printing Office (NPO) has started the initial run of official ballots to be used for the May polls, Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal confirmed Monday.

The poll body official said the NPO had to print ballots for the residents of Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (Armm) because of the Arabic translation to be included in the ballots.

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“There was a proposal on early voting earlier and Armm was one of the areas that were proposed to have early so we synchronized it as a matter of precaution,” added Larrazabal.

The one day delay in printing was also because of the adjustments that had to be made by the NPO based on the official size of the ballots.

Larrazabal said the printers and cutters had to be calibrated since the election ballots to be printed are 25 inches long compared to their previous target of 29 inches.

“Yesterday, they started the initial run of the ballots...There were some adjustments that had to be made like the calibration because the ballots were made shorter. Today, okay na,” said the commissioner.

The NPO will be printing 50,723,734 million ballots, one for each registered voter.

Each ballot will undergo quality control where it will be fed into a poll machine. If a ballot gets rejected, it will no longer be used for the elections.

Originally, the NPO would have begun the printing of the ballots on January 25 and was moved to January 30 then supposedly final on January 31.

Comelec Chairman Jose Melo earlier explained that the schedule was moved because of the pending motions for reconsideration filed by different parties with the Supreme Court (SC).

The poll body will be shipping out these ballots starting March and they will target to finish the printing by April. The commission has yet to determine which area they will deliver the ballots first.

PCOS delivery

In a related development, Larrazabal said the delivery of precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines is still on track to meet the February 21 deadline.

Smartmatic spokesperson Gene Gregorio told Sun.Star that out of the 82,200 PCOS machines, 48,900 are already with Comelec and are stored in its warehouse in Laguna.

Another 7,200 machines are awaiting customs release, 800 are in-transit while the other 25,300 are still waiting to be shipped but have been produced already.

Two sizes

The official ballots, meanwhile, will have two sizes.

Commissioner Larrazabal said the size of the ballots for the rest of the country will still be 8 and one half by 25 inches long, while the ballots for the Armm will have the same width but will be two inches longer in height.

Aside from having a longer ballot, the previous proposal to hold early voting in the Armm is also the reason why they chose to print Armm ballots ahead of the ballots to be used in the other parts of the country.

The Comelec is also set to print some 1,631 unique ballot faces, the number that corresponds to the number of municipalities and cities in the country since the names of the national and local candidates will be pre-printed. (Kathrina Alvarez/With FP/Sunnex)