The Source Code Passed Review. The Only Copy a Poll Watcher Could Read Never Left the Room.
COMELEC's counting machines run on code a first-time poll watcher in Cotabato cannot open, from a 2025 contract that drew a single qualified bid.
The next national vote lands in May 2028, roughly 20 months away, and the way the country buys the machines that count your ballot already carries a familiar weakness. It is not a cartel of the same firms winning forever. It is thinner than that: the last big counting-machine contract drew a single bidder, and the source-code review that would let an ordinary citizen check the tally sits behind restrictions that keep it from the public. A first-time poll watcher who signs up in Cotabato can sit in the polling place all day and never see the one thing that decides the count.
That is the shape of the problem. The vote gets automated for speed and clean arithmetic, but the parts that would let a citizen check the arithmetic sit off-limits. You can watch the ballots go in. You cannot read the code that reads them.
The bid that drew one taker
Smartmatic supplied Philippine election technology from the first automated polls in 2008 and 2010 through the 2022 elections, then got disqualified from Comelec biddings. For the 2025 midterms, Comelec awarded the automated election system contract, the Lease of a Full Automation System with Transparency Audit/Count, or FASTrAC, to a joint venture led by South Korean firm Miru Systems Co. Ltd. by unanimous en banc vote on February 21, 2024. Miru was the lone bidder, submitting a ₱17.988-billion proposal against an ₱18.827-billion budget ceiling.
The contract, signed in March 2024 and valued at ₱17.99 billion, covers about 110,000 automated counting machines plus peripherals: 104,345 ballot boxes, laptops, ballot paper, and the canvassing system. That is the recurring competition problem, and it is documented: single-bidder awards, not rotation among a fixed set of incumbents. The technical requirements are steep, the timeline is short, and few firms anywhere run national-scale counting systems, so the country ends up negotiating from weakness.
A review nobody outside the room can verify
The law is clear that the code should be open. Republic Act 9369, passed in 2007, requires Comelec to make the source code of the chosen system available for review by any interested party. Here is the catch that swallows the safeguard: election-watchdog groups have long flagged that the local source code review runs under conditions that keep findings from traveling out to the public, so what reviewers see, they cannot fully carry back.
Comelec launched the local source code review for the 2025 national and local elections in Makati City in October 2024. Chairman George Erwin Garcia then approved an extension of the review until January 2025, in a memorandum dated December 16, 2024, after the review committee said the codes on the table were not yet the secured versions meant for the final trusted build. The review happened. The proof that would let a poll watcher trust it stayed inside the process.
So a volunteer in Cotabato who wants to know the machine is honest has to trust a chain she cannot inspect: a supplier she did not choose, a commission that leans on that supplier, and a review whose findings do not reach her. The confidence she is asked to extend runs entirely on other people's word.
Speed is not the same as trust
None of this proves fraud, and it is worth saying plainly, because the loudest voices online will read every locked door as a stolen election. That claim needs the same skepticism as the secrecy it attacks. A closed review is a governance failure, not automatic evidence of rigging, and treating it as instant proof of theft feeds the disinformation that already floods your feed each cycle.
The fix is boring and specific. Open the bidding wide enough that more than one firm shows up, and start early enough that a real field can form. Publish the terms of every counting-machine contract. Loosen the review restrictions so nominated reviewers can report findings in plain language a barangay volunteer can read. A poll watcher should be able to audit the count without a security clearance, and right now the rules say she cannot.
