FOR the upcoming #BotoNgKabataan2025 local and senatorial elections, registered Filipino voters will use the Comelec’s new voting machines to cast their votes.   

From 2016’s Smartmatic vote-counting machine, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) received new equipment from South Korea’s firm Miru Systems that will be used for the 2025 midterms. 

The Comelec has paid P17.9 billion for leasing 110,00 (11k or 110k??) voting machines from Miru. Adding to this was the supply of printers, ballot papers, canvassing computers, and other election materials. 

There are two systems in one machine which includes a touch-screen feature. 

Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) and Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems are two of the most widely used voting technologies worldwide. 

ACMs from Miru are also OMR devices, however, they also have DRE technology, not like those from Smartmatic.  With this, the touch-screen feature of the equipment can be enabled with voters being able to cast their vote without having to physically fill out a ballot paper. 

How to use the voting machine 

To begin–all registered voters will be given ballot papers to cast their votes for their chosen elected officials and party lists. 

This ballot paper will later be filled out by the voter and will later be inserted into the machine to scan the name of the officials they elected. 

Following the ballot being fed to the machine, the voters will see a summary of the names of the candidates they supported on a screen. 

Before selecting “cast” on the screen, the system will ask them to check their votes one more time.

If the voter made a mistake on the filling, the voter has the option to reclaim their ballot and can fill out the overlook sections of their ballots. 

The voting machine will later count the votes to be later sent out to the server of the Comelec. 

Unlike the Smartmatic, the ACM machine is made to have a bigger screen than the machines that have been used from the previous election. 

‘Faster Feeding of ballots’ is also one of the highlighted features in the new voting machine. It was an automatic function that eliminated the need for voters to perfectly line their ballots with the paper feed.

The machine is also upgraded to have a battery that can last for 2 days so that even if the electricity was cut off, the electricity can still push through.  

Aside from the upgrades made to the machines, a QR code was also added to the ballot papers that would ensure if the machine had read the voter’s ballot correctly. 

The receipt will also include a QR code, however, they won’t be allowed to take a photo of that QR code until the election closes. 

With the embedded QR code, election workers can double-check if the result matches the physical ballot. To do this, all they have to do is to scan the QR code using the built-in camera under the machine’s wide screen.

Once this has been done, the screen will show the image of the paper that the voter finished.