The Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Monday it only needs to print just a little more than three million ballots to complete the 50.7 million needed for the nationwide automated polls next month.

Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said a total of 46,860,650 million ballots have already been produced at the National Printing Office (NPO) in Quezon City four days before the printing’s deadline of April 25.

“In the last 24 hours, some 1,032,710 ballots have been printed. We are confident that within the week, we will be able to finish printing all the ballots,” said Larrazabal in a media briefing.

The poll body expects the NPO to meet its target of printing all the ballots by April 23 or the next day, which leaves a two-week period to distribute them to precincts nationwide.

“This is a guarantee that manual (elections) will be conducted nationwide independent of automation. As long as the ballots are in the precincts, the people can vote and these ballots can be counted... so it is impossible to talk about failure of elections,” said Smartmatic spokesman Cesar Flores.

Flores said the daily average production of 800,000 ballots has increased to a rate of more than a million a day.

Asked how they were able to print the ballots ahead of schedule, he said, “In every production, once you refine the process, people are trained and the learning curve is achieved. The process runs better.”

Flores added they were able to speed up the ballot production also because of the additional printing press.

Meanwhile, the Comelec en banc has given its nod to the recommendation of the technical working group on random manual audit for the May polls.

In the meeting of Comelec Chairman Jose Melo and six commissioners, it was agreed that the random selection of five precincts for every legislative district will be audited at 3 p.m. and done manually on election day through the traditional visual mode.

The auditors will be the BEIs (Board of election inspectors) themselves selected in the following manner:

• BEI from the clustered polling precinct immediately after the randomly selected precinct
• BEI from the clustered polling precinct immediately before the randomly selected precinct should this be the last precinct in the Voting Center
• BEI from the next barangay should the randomly selected precincts be the lone precinct in the Voting Center.

“If done correctly and randomly, it would show to all the parties and interested stakeholders that the system works as long as these ballots are opened and counted and compared with electronic results. You will have a guarantee that the system works,” Flores said.