Lawyers group to file impeachment complaint vs. Comelec commissioners

A group of lawyers has called for the impeachment of Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairperson George Garcia and the six sitting Comelec commissioners before the House of Representatives, accusing them of betrayal of public trust, culpable violation of the Constitution and other high crimes.

In a press conference on Monday, lawyers Marvin Aceron and Sikini Labastilla said they intend to file impeachment complaints against the Comelec officials for violations of the Automated Election Law and a “documented pattern of institutional misconduct across two consecutive election cycles."

They said Comelec chair Garcia said in a July 14, 2025 interview that the software version used in the 2025 polls was 3.5.0—a version that was not the source code subjected to the mandatory review. 

Garcia, however, said that the 3.5.0 version was the version that went through the review.

The Constitution and the House rules require at least one endorser of an impeachment complaint for it to be deemed a verified one that can be filed before the Office of the House of Representatives’ Secretary General.

The impeachment complaint by the lawyers, however, has not yet been endorsed by any House member as of March 30.

Other grounds

Likewise, the lawyers argued that the Comelec Commissioners must be impeached for installing and operating an unauthorized intermediary server designated “Data Center 3” through which all election results in the May 12, 2025 elections were routed before reaching the five accredited transparency servers—leaving Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting and National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections without results for over two hours after polls closed.

Further, the lawyers said Garcia’s alleged initial concealment of the information that the deployment of a single private IP address, 192.168.0.2, for 20,300 vote-counting machine modems, which was only disclosed 14 months after the May 2022 elections, is a clear betrayal of public trust and as such, an impeachable offense.

“When citizen investigators filed a petition before the Supreme Court to preserve the telco transmission logs that would have independently verified the source of over 20 million first-hour votes, those logs were allowed to expire and were destroyed. Garcia later publicly promised a manual recount of 2022 ballots, the Commission en banc formally resolved to conduct it, and the Commission then did nothing,” they said in a statement.

“The Supreme Court, in G.R. No. 273136 [issued on] August 20, 2024, expressly found the Commission guilty of official inaction for violating its own procedural rules,” the lawyers added.

Lastly, the lawyers said that the Comelec Commissioners should be impeached over systematic and selective enforcement of campaign finance laws that consistently favored senators allied with the appointing administration such as in the following instances:

• clearing Senator Francis Escudero in connection with a P30-million campaign donation from Escudero’s friend, who is a contractor
• absolving Senator Rodante Marcoleta of liability even if he failed to declare P75 million worth of campaign donations under his Statement of Contributions and Expenditures for his 2025 successful Senate run despite the Commission’s own Political Finance and Affairs Department finding non-compliance with the law in both cases.

“We are calling for this now because two of the seven respondents—Commissioners [Aimee] Ferolino and [Rey] Bulay—will complete their terms on February 2, 2027. Thus, the accountability window for their participation in the 2022 transmission anomaly is closing,” Aceron said.

“Garcia will supervise the 2028 elections with the same undisclosed transmission architecture, the same pattern of evidence concealment, and the same selective enforcement record that are the subject of this complaint. That cannot happen without a formal legal record demanding accountability,” he added.

Labastilla, for his part, said the Comelec is no longer the honorable institution it used to be.

“The Comelec was once led by Haydee Yorac, who made even warlords follow the election gun ban; by Hilario Davide Jr., who presided over the first free elections after the Marcos dictatorship and later administered the oath at EDSA; and by Regalado Maambong, Constitutional Commissioner, who helped frame the very provisions under which this complaint is filed and championed the automation law whose mandatory Source Code Review Garcia violated,” he said.

“The complaint invokes Apolinario Mabini’s April 1898 challenge to Filipino revolutionaries: we must march along the narrow road of honor and virtue, because it is only along this path that we will find true freedom. Garcia’s Comelec took the wide and easy road. This complaint takes the narrow one,” Labastilla added.

Garcia responds

Garcia said the allegations are baseless and have already been repeatedly addressed. 

"These are old issues to which we already responded. The credibility of our 2022 and 2025 elections has been proven by random manual audit, revision [recount] of ballots in various positions and jurisdictions, as well as testified citizens' arm as well as local and international observers," Garcia said in a statement. — BM, GMA Integrated News

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