As the Commission on Elections (Comelec) continues to subject more printed ballots to verification and quality control, more ballots were found defective by the poll body, making the total hit more than 220,000.
On March 31, Commissioner George Erwin M. Garcia bared that over 170,000 ballots were found defective, and said the number may still go up.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, April 6, Commissioner Marlon S. Casquejo---the head of the Comelec printing committee--- reported that the total of defective ballots is now at 224,087.
To ensure the quality of the official ballots, he said that the verification of ballots is still ongoing.
So far, according to Casquejo, 83.93 percent of ballots have been verified, and only 14.44 percent of ballots are up for verification.
He said that, after the ballots are “reverified”, the identified defective ballots will be incinerated
The commissioner assured the public that after the ballots are reverified, the defective ballots will be destroyed.
On April 2, the poll body announced that it has printed all the 67,442,616 ballots for the May 2022 national and local elections, ahead of its target completion.