Comelec Is Buying the 2028 Vote Machines First. The Audit Comes Later.
First-time voters in Cavite and Laguna will be promised a source-code review before 2028. The order it happens in decides whether that promise means anything.
A source-code review means little if the machines and ballots are already committed by the time experts finish reading the software. That risk sits at the front of any 2028 planning, because the sequencing of the audit against procurement and printing is exactly what determines whether the review can change anything or just certify what is already built.
For a 19-year-old registering in Bacoor or Calamba, this is your first national vote. The pitch you inherit is a clean one. Independent reviewers get to inspect the code that runs your vote, confirm the count matches the intent, and certify the system before you fill in an oval. Whether that holds depends on when the review lands relative to everything else.
The 2025 review shows how the calendar can work
The last cycle offers a useful benchmark. For the May 2025 national and local elections, Comelec opened the local source-code review on October 14, 2024, and said it would run until the last week of December 2024, months before election day rather than weeks. That review covered the FASTrAC system and the Online Voting and Counting System for overseas voters, and that kind of runway gives a finding room to matter.
Printing shows how tight the rest of the calendar gets. Ballots have to be produced for tens of millions of registered voters, and once presses run at that scale, changing course is expensive and slow. So the review has to close well before the paper starts moving, or the finding arrives too late to act on.
2028 is still upstream of the vote
The schedule that matters most is the order of operations, not any single date. Procurement, code review, and printing each have their own calendar, and whichever one Comelec treats as the fixed anchor bends the others around it. If the machines and vendors are locked before reviewers open the code, the audit inherits whatever was already bought.
That is the whole point. A permit to inspect is not the power to correct if the inspection arrives after the contracts close. The transparency you are promised only bites if the review is scheduled as a gate the buying has to clear, not a formality that runs behind it.
Who supplies the machines is not fixed either
The country's election technology is not the property of one permanent supplier. Miru Systems, not the long-time provider Smartmatic, supplied the automated election system used in 2025, which shows the field can change between cycles. Whoever supplies the 2028 machines will shape the delivery timeline, and that timeline can quietly set how much scrutiny fits before the machines are staged.
Automated elections are a legal mandate under the country's poll automation law, so the method for May 2028 is not in question. What the law settles is that machines will count the vote. It does not settle the order in which the code gets reviewed against when the hardware and ballots are committed, and that gap is where the real fight lives.
What a real audit would require
The fix is boring and specific. Open the source code to accredited reviewers early enough that a finding can actually halt or reroute production, and write that requirement into the schedule before contracts and printing lock. For Cavite and Laguna's newest voters, the stakes are plain: you will be told the system was reviewed, and the only question worth asking is whether anyone could have acted on that review before your ballot was already boxed.
