00:00The COMELEC is struggling with the 14 billion pesos that the budget department has allocated to their 2025 budget request.
00:09This is also the year of the election.
00:11The possible effect of Jonathan Andal's decision.
00:18In the presentation of the Commission on Elections Chairman George Garcia to the House Appropriations Committee,
00:23he expressed his concern for the requested budget for 2025.
00:27Whenever possible, there will be national and local elections.
00:31He said that the Department of Budget and Management reduced the requested fund by 14 billion pesos.
00:37The contest will suffer because of the 14 billion pesos that we lost.
00:42Although we understood the small physical space that the government has now.
00:47The DBM removed 11 billion pesos from the budget for the Barangay Nitsangguniang Kabataan elections
00:54and 3 billion pesos for the national and local elections.
00:58Because of this, the training for the teachers who will serve in the elections is affected.
01:02There is no more addition to the honorarium of the teachers in BSKE 2025.
01:06They also said that 111 million pesos for overseas internet voting is not enough because their contract for the system is already 100 million pesos.
01:14The expenses in logistics and reverse logistics are not included.
01:18We will be happy if we can get it back.
01:20But we don't want to put pressure on the committee on appropriations about that.
01:26We believe that whatever the Executive Department reduced, there is a reason for it.
01:32Garcia said that their budget for this year is not enough.
01:36Instead of 120,000 pesos that will be presented in the 2025 elections, it will be 104,000 pesos only.
01:44There is also an extra 6,000 machines that are on standby in case of an emergency.
01:49We are waiting for the reaction of the DBM to what Garcia said.
01:52In the end, the lawmakers expressed their support to return to COMELEC the 14 billion pesos budget.
01:59For GMA Integrated News, Jonathan Andal, for 24 Hours.
02:14For GMA Integrated News, Jonathan Andal, for 24 Hours.
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