Manila, March 4 -- The Commission on Elections (Comelec) disagrees with Senator Risa Hontiveros' contention that the certification of the automated election system (AES) should be conducted three months before the actual polls on May 12.

"If that's the argument, the law is a directory. If that's the case, the elections of 2010, 2013 until 2022, all of them are violations... If the three-month rule is really a hard and fast rule, then everything that happened since 2010 [were violations]. But the elections were all orderly," Comelec Chairperson George Erwin Garcia said in an interview Tuesday.

He said the certification for the AES falls under the purview of the technical evaluation committee (TEC).

"The TEC is an independent entity not ...