The Commission on Elections announced on Friday that the decision on the petition to ban service provider Smartmatic in the bidding process for the upcoming 2025 elections may come out next week.

According to Comelec chairman George Erwin Garcia, the draft resolution is expected to be presented on Wednesday.

"A draft resolution will be presented on Wednesday, so the Comelec en banc could either approve or reject it," Garcia said.

"We want to decide on the disqualification of Smartmatic before the opening of the offers," Garcia added.

The bidding for the P18.827 billion lease contract for a new automated election system in the 2025 midterm elections was officially opened earlier this week by the Comelec.

Garcia stated that his offer to open the ballot boxes used in the 2022 elections still stands to help clarify issues concerning alleged irregularities.

"We would like to find out the truth so that we don't have any doubts. The ballot has already been opened before… with a random manual audit, we will probably not open it again like that at the expense of the commission, no problem, just to get it over, and again, my offer is still the same," Garcia said.

The chairman also suggested printing the ballot images from the SD cards currently stored at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas so the petitioners could verify the total number of votes from Eleksyon 2022.

The Department of Information and Communications Technology chief Eliseo Mijares Rio Jr., Augusto Cadelina Lagman, Franklin Fayloga Ysaac, and Leonardo Olivera Odono filed the petition against Smartmatic on 15 June.

Smartmatic responded earlier that the allegations were "not only false but are mere baseless speculations with a singular goal of maligning our company".
"We confidently stand by the demonstrable 100% accuracy of the results of the 2022 elections in the same way that we remain very confident in the untarnished reliability and integrity of our products and solutions," Smartmatic said in a statement.

Smartmatic also said it was confident that the Comelec would dismiss the petition for "sheer lack of merit."