An Act Providing for the Bangsamoro Electoral Code of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao

This is the region's first election law, filed as a cabinet bill on the opening filing day of the Second Parliament and enacted as BAA 35 just under 6 months later. Fourteen articles across 62 pages, covering the electoral office, the tribunal, political parties, every elective position, the electorate, the administration of the vote, and the offenses.

The Parliament it describes has 80 members: 50% party representatives elected region-wide by proportional representation, 40% district representatives, and 10% reserved and sectoral seats — never fewer than 8. Two of those are reserved for non-Moro indigenous peoples and 2 for settler communities, with 1 each for women, youth, traditional leaders and the 'Ulama. Party seats go only to parties clearing 4% of the valid votes cast, each of which files a ranked list of up to 40 nominees before the vote.

Article V is the part that does the most work, and it is not about voting at all. It regulates the internal life of political parties. A party needs 10,000 residents with voting rights to be established, distributed as far as practicable across the provinces and cities, with chapters in every province and city and in a majority of the municipalities of each province. It must have a constitution and by-laws covering 11 enumerated subjects, and it must have 6 organs: an Executive Committee of at least 5 elected every 3 years, a General Party Committee of at least 20 elected by proportional geographic representation, a Delegates Committee that nominates the party's candidates, Local Branches, a Membership Committee, and a Party Arbitral Committee whose members must hold a Juris Doctor and at least 1 of whom must be a full member of the Philippine Bar. Every one of these is elected by secret ballot. No one may belong to 2 regional parties — doing so forfeits membership in both — and where a member's regional party conflicts with a national party they also belong to, they must uphold the regional one or forfeit their regional membership.

The government's own tenure is in here too. The Chief Minister must already be a member of Parliament, serves 3 years, and may not serve more than 3 consecutive terms. Two Deputy Chief Ministers must come from the 2 subregions the Chief Minister does not — the Code names 3: South Western Mindanao, North Central Mindanao and South Central Mindanao. And a vote of no confidence by 2/3 of all members obliges the Chief Minister, within 72 hours, to advise the Wali to dissolve Parliament and call an election within 120 days. The Wali may not countermand that advice. A government may face such a vote only once in a term, and not within a year of taking office or within a year before a regular election.

Section 2 states the purpose in the vocabulary of institutional design rather than reform: to prescribe the structural, functional and procedural principles for elections in the region, and to secure honest, credible, just and free elections allowing democratic political participation and reflecting the genuine will of the electorate.

The real answer is in the Organic Law, which required the region to legislate its own electoral code and left it without one. Section 4 adds the interpretive instruction that follows from that: where the Code is ambiguous, the parliamentary ministerial nature of the Bangsamoro Government is always to be taken into account. A region switching from an executive-and-council system to a parliamentary one cannot borrow a national election law wholesale, and this Code is the answer to that problem more than to any particular electoral grievance.

The footnotes are the first thing to notice, because filed bills in this registry do not have any. This one cites the Electoral Code of Macedonia for its definition of a coalition, Malaysia's Elections Act 1958 for its definition of an elector, and the rules of the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal for the tribunal's procedure — and it marks its own departures, noting where a provision is "proposed additional" and why. The drafters left their working out on the page. For a region writing its first election law under a form of government it had never used, showing which comparative source each borrowed mechanism came from is a form of accountability, and it did not survive into the enacted statute, where footnotes have no place.

Article V is where the Code makes its real argument. Almost none of it is about elections; it is about what a political party has to be internally before it may contest one. Ten thousand founding members, chapters in every province and city, 6 mandatory organs elected by secret ballot every 3 years, and an arbitral committee that must include a member of the Bar. In a region where politics has run on families and personal followings, requiring a party to have a written constitution, a membership committee and an internal court is an attempt to build something that outlives the person who founded it. Whether a statute can manufacture that is the open question, and the Code's own interpretive rule — resolve ambiguity toward the parliamentary and party-based reading — shows the drafters knew it would be tested.

Two tensions in the filed copy are worth recording, because they were resolved somewhere in committee and the resolution is not published. Sectoral representatives are nominated by Parliament through the Speaker and appointed by the Chief Minister under Section 22 — but Section 26 says the non-Moro indigenous seats are determined by plurality of votes, and states it twice, once as "the Parliamentary Election conducted for the purpose" and once as "the elections to be conducted by the Parliament for that purpose". An election among voters and an election among members of Parliament are entirely different things, and the filed bill contains both sentences. Separately, the age ceiling for a youth candidate is 25 in Section 8 and 30 in Section 21.

The no-confidence provisions are the most consequential thing here and the least discussed. Two thirds of all members can end a government, and once the vote succeeds the Chief Minister has 72 hours and no discretion: the advice to dissolve must be given, and Section 28(4) says the Wali shall in no case countermand it. That is a deliberate closing of the one door through which a ceremonial head of region might have become a political actor. Against it sits the limit of 1 no-confidence vote per term, which protects a government from being harried — and means that a government which survives its single challenge cannot be removed by Parliament again before the next election.

The Code has already been amended twice, both on the same day in January 2026: BAA 87 removed the "none of the above" option from the ballot, and BAA 88 amended BAA 35 directly.