By Ann Cuisia, June 15, 2026 (Republished from the author. Originally posted on the author’s blog.)

Technologist Ann Cuisia urged COMELEC to disclose whether its scrapped ₱6-billion blockchain election proposal involved a serious audit layer or costly technology theater

A recent BitPinas report said the Commission on Elections removed blockchain technology components and voter verification systems from its proposed 2028 election budget, reducing the proposal by around ₱6 billion.

As someone who has worked in blockchain, digital identity, and public-sector technology for years, I do not see this as COMELEC simply saying no to blockchain. The more important question is what exactly was being sold to government for that amount.

The report does not say the proposal involved NFTs — but it did show events of consultations of COMELEC about blockchain, and the most recent one was geared towards NFTs. It also does not say voter identity would be captured or linked to ballots. Those details are important because blockchain, voter verification, ballot secrecy, and election auditability are separate issues. When they are bundled into one expensive technology basket, government ends up debating slogans instead of architecture.

COMELEC was right to be cautious. Any election technology that creates privacy risks, weakens ballot secrecy, or allows voters to prove how they voted should be rejected. A system that turns votes into tokens, receipts, or traceable digital artifacts would create risks for vote-buying, coercion, and political profiling. Still, rejecting a bad proposal is not the same as rejecting verifiability.

The Philippines has already seen how blockchain can sound innovative while missing the accountability problem. Public reports described the Department of Budget and Management’s blockchain project for SARO and NCA documents as a system where documents were minted on-chain using NFTs. That may sound modern, but it raises a basic concern: what exactly became transparent?

Blockchain should not be used where simpler tools can do the job. For document authentication, it is overkill. There are far more cost-effective technologies than spending ₱63 million to mint SAROs and NCAs.

A SARO or NCA is only one document in a much longer public finance chain. Real accountability follows the money and the actions around it: appropriation, release, obligation, procurement, bidding, contract award, delivery, inspection, payment, audit action, and outcome. If only selected documents are placed on-chain while the underlying actions remain outside a verifiable system, blockchain becomes a certificate layer. It proves that a document existed. It does not prove that public money was properly spent.

That is document tokenization, not deep transparency.

If the same design thinking, vendor-driven logic, or tendency to dress up public documents with expensive blockchain language was brought to COMELEC, then it should be called out. Elections are too sensitive for technology theater. Taxpayers should not pay billions for systems that look sophisticated but do not solve the right problem.

Blockchain has a legitimate role only when applied to the correct layer. In elections, that layer is not the vote itself. Votes should not be placed on-chain. Voter identity should not be exposed. Ballot choices should never become traceable digital artifacts.

The serious use case is an election audit layer. An election is a chain of official events: machine configuration, software certification, ballot printing, precinct opening, election return generation, transmission, canvassing, certificate production, audit logging, and digital signing.

Those events can be verified without exposing voter identity or ballot choices. A properly designed system can record hashes of election files, not the files themselves. It can record digital signatures of authorized officials, not voter data. It can timestamp audit milestones, not ballots. It can allow watchdogs, political parties, auditors, courts, and citizens to check whether records were altered after generation.

That is very different from putting votes or voter receipts on-chain.

The public should be able to verify whether an election return transmitted from a precinct is the same election return generated by the authorized machine. Watchdogs should be able to compare canvass files with underlying records. Political parties should be able to detect if critical election documents changed after submission. Auditors should be able to see whether official actions were signed by the proper authority at the proper time.

COMELEC should widen the review.

If a blockchain proposal protects ballot secrecy, improves auditability, reduces disputes, avoids vendor capture, and justifies its cost, then it deserves serious study. If it merely adds another expensive layer of branding, reports, tokens, or proprietary complexity, then COMELEC should walk away.

But COMELEC should also disclose what exactly was removed from the proposed 2028 budget. The public deserves to know whether the ₱6-billion reduction came from a serious election audit layer, an inflated voter verification system, a vendor-specific blockchain package, or a proposal influenced by the same flawed document-tokenization logic we have already seen in other agencies.

COMELEC should open that portion of the proposal to proper technical review. Let real blockchain architects weigh in. If there is a better, safer, and more cost-efficient way to design verifiability, COMELEC should be willing to hear it.

This opinion article by Ann Cuisia is published on BitPinas: [Op-Ed] Ann Cuisia: COMELEC Should Not Reject Blockchain. It Should Reject Bad Blockchain Proposals

What else is happening in Crypto Philippines and beyond?