COMELEC urged not to reject blockchain outright, but reject flawed proposals

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The Commission on Elections is being urged not to reject blockchain technology outright, but to closely examine the proposals being presented to the agency, according to TraXion Tech Inc. CEO and Founder Ann Cuisia.

The call comes after reports that COMELEC removed blockchain technology components and voter verification systems from its proposed 2028 election budget.

Cuisia said the issue should focus on what kind of system was proposed and whether it would genuinely improve election transparency, auditability, and accountability.

She said blockchain, voter verification, ballot secrecy, and election auditability are separate issues that should not be bundled into one expensive proposal without clear technical explanation.

“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,” Cuisia said.

She warned that any system that turns votes into tokens, receipts, or traceable digital artifacts could create risks for vote-buying, coercion, and political profiling.

However, Cuisia said rejecting a questionable blockchain proposal should not mean rejecting election verifiability itself.

According to her, blockchain has a legitimate role only if applied to the correct layer of the election process. She said votes should not be placed on-chain, voter identity should not be exposed, and ballot choices should never become traceable digital artifacts.

Instead, Cuisia said the serious use case for blockchain in elections is an audit layer that records hashes of election files, digital signatures of authorized officials, and timestamps of audit milestones without exposing voter data or ballot choices.

She said this could allow watchdogs, political parties, auditors, courts, and citizens to check whether election records were altered after they were generated.

“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,” Cuisia said.

She also compared the issue to previous public reports on the Department of Budget and Management’s blockchain project for SARO and NCA documents, which she described as document tokenization rather than deep transparency.

Cuisia said placing selected documents on-chain does not automatically prove that public funds were properly spent, especially if procurement, bidding, contract awards, delivery, inspection, payment, audit actions, and outcomes remain outside a verifiable system.

“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,” she said.

Cuisia urged COMELEC to disclose what exactly was removed from the proposed 2028 budget, including whether the reduction involved an election audit layer, a voter verification system, a vendor-specific blockchain package, or another form of technology proposal.

She said COMELEC should open that portion of the proposal to proper technical review and allow blockchain architects and election technology experts to assess whether there are safer, better, and more cost-efficient ways to improve election verifiability.

“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,” Cuisia said.