Country Profile – Philippines

Confronted with the rapid proliferation of AI-generated content during the 2022 presidential election, the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) emerged as one of the first electoral management bodies (EMBs) globally to adopt the Voluntary Electoral Integrity guidelines—collaboratively developed with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), global social media representatives, and electoral authorities. The guidelines provided decisive regulatory measures addressing AI-enabled digital campaigning and electoral misinformation and disinformation, serving as a key component of COMELEC’s comprehensive, all-of-society program to protect electoral information integrity. This program culminated in Resolution No. 11064, a landmark policy representing one of the first regulatory frameworks globally to address AI in election campaigns explicitly. Other electoral authorities, including in the Republic of Maldives and Bangladesh, have since turned to COMELEC and the ‘Philippine model’ when formulating their own campaign-oriented AI-governance policies.

Following these early policy advances in addressing the ways in which AI is utilized in digital election campaigns, COMELEC is now directing its attention inwards. As of 2026, the Commission is undertaking systematic efforts to identify, institutionalize, and harmonize the deployment of AI by electoral practitioners nationwide. This involves conducting needs assessments and risk evaluations to calibrate how AI tools can most fruitfully be designed and deployed to assist meaningfully in different functions and across departments, all the while retaining democratic accountability and public transparency.

How is AI used to improve electoral management in the Philippines?

COMELEC’s internal adoption of AI technologies reflects an institutional approach characterized by a growing utilization of AI across administrative functions in central and field offices alike. However, the Commission is increasingly looking to centralize AI governance, imparting end-user practitioners with clearer guidelines on responsible AI adoption, as well as enabling COMELEC to pursue more ambitious AI projects:

There are currently three notable strands of AI development at COMELEC:

• AI inventory survey: In 2025, COMELEC conducted an internal nationwide ‘Survey on the Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools’ to document systematically when, how, and for what purposes AI-tools were already being deployed across different facets of the organization. With responses from more than a thousand staff members from COMELEC’s main office departments and regional offices, nearly half of all surveyed staff have reported using AI for the performance of their daily Commission tasks. The main adopters are administrative staff, communications personnel, technical departments and management. AI-uptake is increasing across all of COMELEC, and the vast majority of staff representatives expressed support for permitting the use of AI tools. At the same time, respondents still largely agree that AI automation, particularly in decision-making processes, should be guided by a human hand.
• Productivity tools: Concrete use-cases of AI-powered productivity tools span a diverse range of applications, including the use of large language models (LLMs) to assist in drafting memoranda, summarizing reports, cross-textual analysis and streamlining routine documentation processes.
• Social media monitoring and threat detection: COMELEC has deployed AI-supported monitoring technologies as part of its commitment to address AI-amplified electoral disruption under Resolution No. 11064. In partnership with the Department of Information and Communications Technology and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordination Center (CICC)—government agencies with the statutory mandate to investigate cyber offenses and coordinate cross-sectoral responses to digital security threats (CICC 2021)—COMELEC utilized a commercial social listening platform to identify viral misinformation, gauge public sentiment and detect potential election threats across social media platforms. This service was used particularly for threat detection in the days surrounding the 2025 national and local elections, when timely detection and rapid response served to decontaminate the electoral information environment and maintain voter access to trustworthy information. The collaboration enabled near real-time detection and response, significantly reducing the spread of harmful narratives and contributing to a more stable and credible electoral information environment.
   

Institutionalizing AI: from ad hoc adoption to structured governance

While the ‘Survey on the Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools’ demonstrates that practitioners across COMELEC are already provisionally using AI to improve operational efficiency and productivity, the Commission recognizes the need to transition from decentralized experimentation to formalized governance. COMELEC’s approach to the institutional use of AI rests on the notion that the responsible integration of AI requires coherent institutional oversight, systematic risk mitigation, and alignment with democratic principles and data protection. This includes compliance with the strict data protection and management provisions stipulated by the Philippine Data Privacy Act 2012, which requires consent-based collection, data minimization and public notification about data breaches (Syafhendry, Ganaie and Yama 2025).

The Commission’s information systems strategic planning in February 2026 represents a critical juncture for institutionalizing AI adoption. Guided by the empirical findings from the 2025 Survey, the planning determines recommendations for an information systems strategic plan that will establish AI procurement standards, define clear use-case boundaries, mandate human oversight mechanisms, ensure compliance with existing regulation and policy, and create accountability structures for AI-assisted decision-making.

The key purpose of this strategic plan is to ensure that AI deployment scales up responsibly, and that there exists a solid foundation of governance upon which the Commission can explore new, substantive operational domains for AI.

COMELEC’s commitment to identifying and harmonizing AI use across its operations is based on an institutional move to replace ad hoc experimentation with centralized governance, particularly as AI capabilities are explored for more substantive functions at the Commission. This transition forms part of COMELEC’s broader Digital Transformation Program under its 2023-2029 Strategic Plan, which seeks to institutionalize technological governance through standardized frameworks, centralized oversight, and long-term capacity building.
 

AI policy development and multi-stakeholder engagement

The ongoing process of developing COMELEC’s AI policy is anchored in global and regional multi-stakeholder engagements. The Commission has developed its governance approach through active participation in cross-national exchanges, such as the Asian Electoral Stakeholder Forum (ASEF) and the Cyber and Information Resilience Network on AI, and through contributions to the Voluntary Election Integrity Guidelines for Technology Companies, launched by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in 2024.

COMELEC’s regional and global engagements paved the way for the Commission to host a National AI Stakeholders Forum in the Philippines ahead of the 2025 national and local elections, which served as a participatory mechanism for crafting a responsive and viable AI policy for digital election campaigning. That forum laid the groundwork for what ultimately would become Resolution No. 11064 and serves as an example of the Commission’s collaborative methodology for formulating AI policy. Several key inputs from external stakeholders are reflected in the substantive provisions of the Resolution. They include mandatory disclosure requirements for using AI, multisectoral cooperation frameworks and the establishment of formal complaint mechanisms for public reporting, and they ensure that COMELEC’s AI policy reflects expert assessments and democratic legitimacy.

COMELEC is currently reviewing internal AI policies to ensure alignment with regional and international standards. Specifically, the Commission references influence from the ASEAN Guide on AI Governance and Ethics (Association of Southeast Asian Nations Secretariat 2024) and its expanded edition addressing generative AI (Association of Southeast Asian Nations Secretariat 2025), the United Nations Task Force to Develop a System-wide Normative and Operational Framework (United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination 2024) on the use of AI in the UN System (UNSCEB 2024), as well as the AI transformation Strategy of the EU Court of Justice (European Commission 2025). Domestically, COMELEC is aligning its AI governance approach with the Philippine Supreme Court’s concurrent development of an AI framework for the judiciary, reflecting an integrated intragovernmental stance on the development of AI principles.
 

AI literacy and capacity building

Beyond the institution of formal guidelines on the use of AI in elections, within and outside the Commission, COMELEC emphasizes the urgency of raising institutional and public literacy regarding AI capabilities, limitations and implications. As an initial part of this effort, the Commission’s formalized cooperation agreements with social media platforms have involved the external training of specialized staff to build in-house AI capacity, including the managing of account security protocols, AI detection methodologies and AI-enabled monitoring tools.

• Training Specialized IT Staff: The 2025 national and local elections provided the first operational test for Resolution No. 11064, yielding significant insight into both the necessity of and limitations of AI policy in high-stakes electoral contexts. During this period, cross-sectoral collaboration proved to be paramount for the Resolution’s practical enforcement. In collaboration with COMELEC, TikTok deployed a dedicated Election Hub for voter education, while Meta increased content moderation through AI-driven detection systems partnered with local fact-checking organizations. These partnerships addressed critical constraints—through the provision of monitoring infrastructure, analytical tools and technical training—that would otherwise have exceeded COMELEC’s independent resource capacity. Ultimately, this network supported the Commission in scaling up and implementing AI-assisted content moderation and threat detection across multiple platforms simultaneously, while building internal technical expertise through the hands-on deployment of advanced monitoring systems.

Considered together, the implementation of Resolution No. 11064 and the preliminary outcomes of the ‘Survey on the Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools’ have directed COMELEC’s attention towards the need to raise AI literacy among both election practitioners and voters. To meet this challenge, COMELEC is investing in education campaigns on AI across all branches of the Commission, as well as through broader voter-education initiatives.

• Raising non-technical practitioner and voter literacy: Building upon the specialized training provided to select personnel in the Task Force—in order to counter disinformation during the 2025 elections—the Commission continues to equip practitioners across regional field offices with technical competencies for utilizing, interpreting and supervising AI systems in their respective operational contexts. Concurrently, public-facing voter-education campaigns aim to develop critical media literacy among constituents, enabling citizens to recognize AI-generated materials, evaluate content authenticity through provenance indicators and resist disinformation narratives.

This multi-pronged approach, deploying simultaneous yet custom AI literacy efforts for IT specialists, electoral practitioners and voters, acknowledges that both the regulatory enforcement of AI policy and responsible integration of new AI technologies depends on confidently informed and critically engaged users throughout the AI lifecycle.