THE Omnibus Election Code was signed into law in 1985 — before the 1987 Constitution, before automated elections, before the internet, and long before social media became the most powerful political weapon in any campaign arsenal. It is the foundational law that governs how we choose our leaders, and it is crumbling at the seams.
We have been patching it for four decades. Seventeen-plus Republic Acts have amended this provision or that provision. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) issues resolutions every election cycle to fill in the gaps that Congress refuses to close. Scholars argue. Lawyers disagree. And the ordinary Filipino voter — the mother in Caloocan, the tricycle driver in Cebu, the farmer in Bukidnon — is left wondering: Is my vote actually being counted the way I cast it?
That question deserves a straight answer. Right now, we cannot give one.
Before 2010, vote counting was public. After the polls closed, the board of election inspectors would sit at the front of the classroom, open the ballot box, call out each vote, write the tally on a blackboard, and anyone in that room could see, in real time, how the count was going. It was slow. It was imperfect. But it was visible.
Then we automated. The precinct count optical scan machines — the PCOS, later replaced by the vote counting machines, or VCMs, and in 2025 the automated counting machines (ACMs) — changed everything. The ballot goes in, the machine reads it, the result is transmitted electronically. Fast. Efficient. And completely invisible to the human eye.
The machine took over — and took transparency with it.
The principle of democratic elections has always been: secret voting, public counting. The first part, we kept. The second part, we surrendered.
Comelec will tell you that transparency measures are in place. Source code reviews. Mock elections. Public demonstrations. Random manual audits. These are not nothing. But they are not the same as transparency of the vote count itself. Allowing a handful of technical experts to review software code in a controlled setting is not the same as allowing every voter in every precinct to see how their ballot was read and tallied. These are fundamentally different things, and we should stop pretending otherwise.
Here is the deeper problem. The automation of our elections was built on a legal foundation that was never designed to carry its weight. Republic Act 9369 — the law that governs our automated election system — does not contain a mandatory source code review requirement that is enforceable in court. It does not create an independent technical audit body with real powers. It does not establish a statutory chain of custody for the transmission of election results. Comelec fills these gaps with resolutions — but resolutions can be changed by the next batch of commissioners. What one Comelec creates, the next can dismantle.
We saw what this fragility looks like in practice. In 2016, the Comelec database was breached. The personal data of 55 million registered voters was leaked online. It remains the largest government data breach in Philippine history. Nobody went to jail. The law was not strengthened. We moved on.
In 2022, SD card issues were documented in Maguindanao del Sur. In multiple elections, the hash codes of the source code reviewed by watchers were problematic. These are not minor glitches. These are cracks in the foundation — and the Omnibus Election Code, in its current fragmented state, gives us no legal hammer to knock them into compliance. You go to your polling precinct. You shade your ballot. You feed it into the machine. The machine beeps. And then what?
You do not know if the machine read your vote correctly. You cannot verify it. The voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) does not confirm that your vote was counted as you intended. The election return — the official record of your precinct’s count — is transmitted to canvassing servers that you cannot access. The random manual audit covers only a fraction of precincts and is conducted after proclamation.
Is this acceptable? Should we simply trust the machine?
Trust is not a transparency mechanism. Trust is what you fall back on when transparency is absent. In a democracy, we should not need to trust blindly. We should be able to see.
The 20th Congress must stop treating electoral reform as something to study indefinitely. Three things need to be done before the 2028 presidential election.
First, recodify the Omnibus Election Code. Consolidate 40 years of amendments into one coherent, constitutionally aligned statute. Resolve the conflicts. Fill the gaps. Give Comelec a foundation that does not require annual resolution-patching to function.
Second, pass an AES Security Act. Mandate source code review timelines in statute — not in a Comelec resolution. Create an independent audit body with real powers. Establish a legal chain of custody for election results. Make the forensic audit a right, not a favor.
Third, restore the public’s ability to see the count. Technology now makes this possible without sacrificing speed. QR codes on election returns. Real-time posting of precinct results. A voter verified paper audit trail. These are not radical ideas. They are the minimum requirements of a transparent democracy.
The 2028 national and local elections are coming. AES procurement has begun with the preparation of the terms of reference and technical specifications. If we do not act now, we will conduct another national election on the same fragile legal framework, with the same invisible count, under the same unresolved doubts.
Your vote is the most powerful thing you possess as a citizen. You deserve to know it was counted. The law should guarantee that. Right now, it does not.
That is the electoral state we are in. And it’s about time we change it.
