After 48 days, the 68.5 million official ballots set to be used in the May 12 midterm polls have been printed, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Saturday.

In a press conference, Comelec Chairman George Garcia said they have printed 68,542,564 official ballots despite being forced to restart due to legal reasons.

"We started last January 27 and we are now done printing the 68,542,564 official ballots," said Garcia.

He said their strategy to use the two HP printers of Miru Systems and the four Canon printers of the National Printing Office (NPO) has proven to be effective.

"We are proud of this because we complied with the Supreme Court TRO, we didn't defy the SC TRO. For almost two weeks, we stopped the printing of ballots. We set aside six million ballots... Just the same, we were able to do it," said Garcia.

He said the Comelec printed an exact number of official ballots equal to the number of registered voters.

"Our ratio is 1:1. We don't have excess ballots printed," said Garcia.

He said a total of 2.2 million ballots were "bad" or rejected. DMS