The Commission on Elections (Comelec) announced Thursday that a joint venture led by Miru Systems has completed the manufacturing and production of over 100,000 automated counting machines (ACMs) for the 2025 midterm elections.

In a statement, the poll body said that the final ACM was manufactured two months ahead of the December deadline which marks the completion of a significant milestone in the Full Automation with Transparency Audit and Count (FASTrAC) project.

At the moment, 78,456 ACMs are already stored at the Comelec warehouse in Biñan, Laguna while the remaining units are either undergoing customs clearance, in transit, or being loaded at a South Korean port.

Aside from the ACMs, the Comelec said Miru has already delivered essential election paraphernalia, including external batteries, power cords, SD cards, thermal paper, smartcards, and other equipment.

Other election materials, such as servers, printers, laptops, modems, USB kits, and headsets for PWD voters, have also arrived in the Philippines.

Miru Systems was awarded the FASTrAC project, valued at over P17 billion, to automate the upcoming elections.

In other developments, the Makabayan Bloc is urging the poll body to clarify its social media guidelines for next year’s elections.

This comes as the bloc wrote to Comelec to seek clarification regarding the poll body’s new social media guidelines that mandating the registration of all social media accounts that will be used primarily for campaigning, saying it has “a big impact on freedom of expression.”

“Although we stand together in the fight against disinformation and abuse of social media, this should not affect the right to express and the ability to campaign,” the group said.

It added that these concerns pertain to the “overbroad scope” of the guidelines, vagueness of some provisions, as well as the mandatory registration of social media accounts, websites, digital and Internet-based campaign platforms of candidates, parties, and non-candidates, and the free speech and privacy implications of such registration.

Makabayan said that their call stemmed from the concerns of social media users, media practitioners, and netizens who fear their social media accounts may be at risk of being taken down or blocked as they might be subjected to what might be construed as “disinformation and misinformation against a candidate, a political party/coalition, and [a] party-list group [or] against the Philippine election system, the Comelec, and the electoral processes.”

In a response to a DAILY TRIBUNE query late Wednesday night, Comelec chairperson George Garcia that the poll body will going to have a dialogue with the Makabayan Bloc on Monday, 4 November.

Garcia earlier reminded candidates that they have until 13 December to register their social media accounts.