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President Duterte has appointed a new election chairman and three commissioners -- all of them from Mindanao. By 2022, Comelec will be run entirely by Duterte’s appointees. Mostly newbies with little or no experience in running national automated elections, they will administer the vote for the next President of the republic, amid calls from politicians to shift to a hybrid manual cum automated election system.

The procurement woes of the Comelec in the May 2019 elections had a backstory in an audit report the year prior. It continues to pay monthly rental for warehouse services without a valid contract. It has an overstock of paper clips, bond paper, and spiral notebooks that had been exposed to rain and the elements, and then left to rot and decay.

Problems with procurement, logistics, supply chain management, tight implementation schedules, and bad -- really bad -- project management. A series of unfortunate events turned the May 2019 elections into a messy affair.

Across the Philippines' 81 provinces, from 30 to over 50 percent of voters failed to vote for party-list groups in May 2019. Many voters missed the names of party-list groups printed on the back of the ballot. The undervoting rate for party-list groups was 37.37 percent in the last elections, nearly double the 20.08 percent in 2016.