An Act Amending Bangsamoro Autonomy Act No. 35, Entitled “an Act Providing for the Bangsamoro Electoral Code of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao”

This rewrites the rules of the game shortly before the region plays it for the first time.

A regional political party now needs five thousand members who are residents and registered voters, spread across a majority of provinces and cities — and chapters in *every* province and city, plus municipal chapters in a majority of municipalities. To win any party representation seat it needs at least two and a half per cent of the valid votes. At least 30% of its nominees must be women, and as far as practicable one in every three; Section 3 does not change that requirement but expressly retains it.

The sectoral system is rebuilt from the ground. Section 7 revokes and cancels every certification previously issued to a sectoral organization or a party's sectoral wing, and everyone starts again under a new process — a verified petition, a member list, a constitution, a sector platform. The ministry then has a non-extendible 15 days, and if it fails to act the certification issues anyway; an official who lets it lapse faces disciplinary action.

Non-Moro Indigenous Peoples are treated differently from every other sector: their representative is elected by their own sectoral assembly rather than by a general plurality vote.

And ₱500 million goes to COMELEC to run the election, released immediately.

The act states no purpose of its own. What it does is prepare the Electoral Code for the first BARMM Parliamentary Election — an election whose date, Section 8 notes, is determined by the Philippine Congress rather than by the region.

Two provisions in this act pull in opposite directions on the same question — how open the first election will be.

Section 6 is genuinely protective. Requiring a certifying ministry to decide within a non-extendible 15 days, issuing the certification automatically if it does not, forbidding denial without written reasons, and making delay a disciplinary matter — that is the same anti-delay architecture found in the bereavement leave act, applied here to the gate a sectoral organization must pass to contest an election. It removes the most effective way to keep an inconvenient group off a ballot, which is simply not to answer.

Section 7 cuts the other way. Every certification previously issued is revoked. Every organization, however long established, re-enters the queue shortly before the first election — and while the fifteen-day clock limits how long the queue can take, the reset itself concentrates a great deal of discretion in the certifying ministries at exactly the moment it matters most. The 2 sections were plainly written together; whether the safeguard is sufficient for the reset is the question a reader should carry.

The organizational thresholds deserve the same scrutiny. Five thousand members is not extreme, but chapters in *all* provinces and cities plus a majority of municipalities is a serious logistical demand in a region of islands and mountains, and it is the kind of requirement that reliably favors parties that already exist over parties that might.

One provision stands apart and is worth naming plainly. Section 16 provides that appointed members of the Transition Authority are not deemed resigned when they file to run, and may hold Cabinet posts while campaigning. There is a transitional logic — a government cannot empty itself mid-term — but the practical effect is that the region's first competitive election is contested by incumbents who keep their offices, their staff and their budgets while contesting it.