OUR barangay (village) elections got another jolt. First, it was oil prices from the Middle East war. Now it’s a Senate bill resetting the polls to 2028 and stretching barangay terms to five years over the objection of election watchdogs, including the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections. Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman George Erwin Garcia has warned that billions already spent could go to waste. Lawmakers want to redirect the rest toward the 2028 elections. Everyone is arguing about money, timing and trust — and rightly so. But underneath the politics is a plainer problem: We are managing an election with paper-era tools, and with numbers that shift depending on who is counting. Technology, used honestly, can settle the cost debates before they start.
The headline figure kept changing. At one point, the worry was that P8 billion “would truly go to waste.” Garcia has since clarified that of the roughly P8 billion already spent, obligated or earmarked, only about P3 billion would actually be unrecoverable — because ballots, ballot boxes and most of the rest can still be reused in a rescheduled election, even one bearing a different date on the ballot itself. That is a meaningful correction: The true cost of postponement is smaller than the number that first alarmed the public. But it also proves the point. If the wastage estimate can move from P8 billion to P3 billion between one public briefing and the next, the public was never getting a count — it was getting an estimate, revised on the fly. What is needed is something retailers and hospitals have used for years: a simple tagging and tracking system, the kind that puts a scannable code on every box of ballots or bottle of ink and logs where it sits and how long it’s good for. Comelec could then tell Congress, item by item, what survives a postponement and what doesn’t — not as a shifting estimate, but as a receipt.
This is exactly why a public disbursement dashboard matters, and the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections (BSKE) episode makes the case better than any brochure could. If the true unrecoverable cost is closer to P3 billion than P8 billion, the public should be able to see that for itself — what was purchased, used, still reusable, or expired — rather than wait for Comelec to announce a revised number at a forum. The same logic applies to the harder fight over the P10.94 billion still unspent, which Garcia now wants Congress’ blessing to shift toward 2028 election preparations, a reversal from his earlier, and correct, view that diverting funds appropriated for one election into another is constitutionally shaky. A public spending dashboard — a website updated automatically as Comelec disburses funds, showing what was spent, reused or reallocated and under what legal authority — would do more to settle this debate than any hearing. Sunlight does not decide the constitutional question, but it makes it much harder to quietly move a peso, or a number, without anyone noticing.
Buried in Garcia’s numbers is a detail worth understanding correctly: A one-year postponement could cost an extra P3 billion, partly because voter registration would reopen. This does not mean the millions already registered lose their standing — their records remain valid. What actually closed was the daily filing window: under Republic Act 8189, or the Voter’s Registration Act, registration runs continuously, but the law requires it to stop 120 days before a regular election, or 90 before a special one — why it closed ahead of the original Nov. 2, 2026 date. Push the election to 2028, and that same law reopens the window at 120 days out, to serve citizens who newly qualify, voters deactivated for missing two consecutive elections who want to reactivate, and voters who moved and need records updated. Each is a legitimate, recurring transaction, not a rebuild from scratch. What drives up the cost is that Comelec treats each reopening as a fresh operation — new staff, venues, campaigns — rather than the lighter, continuous service the law already envisions. A system built to run year-round, with drives layered on only near the statutory cutoff, would let these transactions happen as a voter’s situation changes, without standing up a full apparatus each time an election moves. What that would save is a number only Comelec can calculate — but continuous service, matching what the law requires, should cost less than repeated mobilization.
Here is the opportunity hiding inside this mess. Garcia has linked BSKE preparations to the 2028 national elections, saying a long delay could disrupt that bigger exercise. Rather than treat the barangay polls and 2028 as two separate problems drawing from the same pot of money, Comelec and Congress should design one shared system for both — one voter database, one materials-tracking setup, one training record for election workers — built with 2028 in mind from day one. This is the same principle those of us reviewing the terms of reference for the next national election automation contract have been pressing. Money spent on barangay election infrastructure should not be a sunk cost if it was built to serve 2028 as well.
None of these fixes tells Congress whether to postpone the BSKE. That remains, as Garcia rightly says, a political question for the legislative and executive branches. What technology can do is take the guesswork out of the argument — replacing shifting estimates with counts, statements with dashboards and one-time registration drives with a living, current voter list.
Beyond cost debates, the law should ensure regularity and predictability of the barangay elections, respecting the right of citizens to choose their local leaders.
Our barangay elections should not survive on trust alone every time a crisis or a bill moves the goalposts. They should survive on evidence anyone can check. That is not a partisan position. It is simply good governance — and it is overdue.
