The Commission on Elections (COMELELC) on Friday, May 26, said it’s fully ready for the upcoming barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections in October.

“We are happy to inform the public that the COMELEC is 100 percent ready to conduct the elections of the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan on October 30,” COMELEC Spokesperson Rex Laudiangco said.

“We have already printed almost 92 million ballots that we’ll be using. All the election returns, statements of rules. And in fact, they have already been packed and ready for pre-deployment,” he said.

He added that COMELEC is also set to train electoral board members by September, while the deployment of ballots and paraphernalia shall be done a few days before the election day.

Furthermore, the COMELEC is now finalizing the venues of the pilot testing for mall voting nationwide, he said.

“The primary beneficiaries of this mall voting will be those residing in barangays with close proximity to the malls… Our countrymen should not commute going to the malls, it should be walking distance from their residences,” Laudiangco said.

He said they are looking at about a million mall voting beneficiaries for its pilot test.PNA