NPO now printing one million ballots a day

MANILA, Philippines - The National Printing Office (NPO) has reached its target of printing one million official ballots a day.

“We were told that the NPO is confirming that it’s now printing one million ballots per day and it has been doing so for the past four days,” Commission on Elections (Comelec) spokesman James Jimenez said.

So far, the NPO had already printed more than 11 million official ballots for the May 13 elections.

“We are requesting for a summary report of the last week so we can verify their claim that their daily average is a million or better, but that’s the latest word that we’ve gotten from the NPO,” Jimenez said.

The state-run NPO was given 90 days, or from Feb. 4 to April 25, to print 52,017,360 ballots. It outsourced the service to the joint venture of Holy Family Printing Corp. and its partner Canon Marketing Philippines.

Three high-end Canon Color Stream 3000 printers are being used to produce the ballots.

Initially, they were printing 314 ballots per minute until they were able to reach one million four days ago.

According to Jimenez, each ballot is eight inches in width and 27 inches in length, almost the same size as the ballots used in the 2010 elections.

This apparently defeats the purpose of the Comelec in strictly screening the party-list organizations that will join this year’s race.

In the 2010 polls, a total of 187 party-list groups were listed in the ballots. For this year’s election, however, only 123 groups were included after the Comelec delisted some that failed to prove they genuinely represent the marginalized and underrepresented sectors.

Also included in this year’s polls is the election for regional officials of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.