Old enemies

With the Commission on Elections set to bid out the contract for the supply of an additional 40,000 precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines for the use in the 2016 elections, it seems that critics of automation are lining up once again to question the country’s decision to leave the archaic manual poll system in favor of an automated election system (AES) which these critics may have forgotten, registered and successfully counted the votes for President Noynoy Aquino as well as a number of the present crop of legislators.

Those who were elected under the automated system fair and square should know when to shut up.

Let’s take Leyte Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, one the leaders of House minority bloc who is leading the move to regress to manual counting of votes. Romualdez, concurrent president of the Philippine Constitution Association (Philconsa), was reelected to his second term as representative of the first district of Leyte province in 2010 when PCOS were first used successfully. And then, he won again in 2013 without any glitch. So what’s with his proposal to ditch the current system?

But what observers have noticed is that the arguments of these critics, and their disciples, have not changed much. Some of them, in fact, are still obviously lobbying for their own election system even if our very own Supreme Court has already given the final statement on the matter when it upheld the legality of the current election system in use.

Professed techie and erstwhile Biliran Rep. Glenn Chong, who had previously asked the SC to nullify the 2013 poll results on claims that the AES/PCOS set-up is rigged, is reportedly poised to file a petition for TRO before the SC to stop the Comelec from bidding out the purchase of additional PCOS units and to disqualify and blacklist this watchdog’s 2010 and 2013 private partner Smartmatic from the public auction.

It is widely believed that Chong is backed up by ousted Comelec commissioner Augusto Lagman, who wants the agency to put off the public auction till after February 2015 when chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. and commissioners Elias Yusoph and Lucenito Tagle are due for retirement.

It appears, however, that Smartmatic is confident that it has the law and history on its side, given the globally acclaimed results of the 2010 and 2013 automated polls, the firm’s solid international reputation as a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, and the SC’s ruling on the accuracy of the machines and legality of the Comelec contracts.

Smartmatic Philippines president Cesar Flores has even dared the AES/PCOS bashers to make good on their plan to seek SC intervention in support of their disqualify-Smartmatic agenda.

But just like many observers, Flores was curious why the fresh calls for Smartmatic’s black-listing has cropped up right after the Comelec had set the bidding in motion by publishing the invitations to bid.

It seems obvious, he said, that the end-goal of the same old AES/PCOS bashers and their newfound allies is to prevent

Smartmatic from bagging the contracts for the 2016 polls.

Lagman’s recent column piece has betrayed his real intention in opposing the PCOS/AES technology, if not poll computerization altogether.

In his Oct. 21 column in a major daily, Lagman revealed that he submitted to the JCOC-AES during its Sept. 18 meeting a paper written by his group, TransparentElections.org.ph, which is a lead organization in the odd mixture of advocacy NGOs with assorted ideologies whose common denominator is a seeming aversion to fully computerized balloting.

In this paper that he was supposed to have submitted to JCOCAES Senate committee secretary Himerio Garcia on Trnsparent-Elections’s behalf, Lagman and his group made another pitch for a mongrel automated-manual voting and counting that the Comelec already rejected in 2009 and asked the congressional panel “to be given a chance to present to the JCOC such system that will only cost the country P4 billion, maybe P5 billion maximum.”

Lagman and his group are obviously pushing anew their baby, the Open Election System (OES) that provides for manual precinctlevel voting and counting combined with computerized canvassing of votes. This system was ditched by the Comelec in 2009 because it contravened the spirit and intent of Republic Act No. 9369, which called for the full computerization of the 2010 elections and succeeding polls as well, through the use of the most suitable AES technology in the “voting, counting, consolidating, canvassing and transmission of election result, and other electoral process.”

Aside from the negotiated contract or competitive bidding for refurbishing the used 80,000 PCOS machines, the Comelec has just issued invitations to bid for the supply of 23,000 units of additional optical media readers (OMR) and 410 units of direct recording electronic (DRE) machines. These lease contracts will each have an “option to purchase” clause, similar to Comelec’s 2009 accord with Smartmatic, which eventually allowed the agency to buy the leased PCOS units for use in 2013 for just P1.8 billion.

Helen Flores, head of the Comelec’s Bids and Awards Committee (BAC), has assured all prospective bidders of fair treatment in the auction. Participants would include Smartmatic and the four other companies that have thus far expressed interest in joining the bidding, namely: Indra Sistemas, E-Konek Pilipinas Inc., Election Systems and Software; and Miru Systems Co. Ltd.

There should be no reason for Comelec, and the country for that matter, to return to the dark ages of manual counting.

As earlier mentioned, the SC has ruled that Comelec’s contracts with Smartmatic were legal and advantageous to the country, and has attested to the accuracy of the PCOS machines.

The Comelec Advisory Council (CAC) has also endorsed a “mix use” formula re-using the existing OMR technology harnessed by AES/PCOS, the purchase of additional units using this OMR technology, and the pilot-testing of a secondary new technology, possibly the DRE system using the touch screen mode, in selected precincts in Metro Manila and other highly urbanized centers like Cebu and Davao.

Let us also not forget the glowing reports on the outcome of the automated elections by international observer groups like the United States-based Carter Center (founded by former American President Jimmy Carter) as well as local NGOs that had monitored the same polls such as Democracy Watch; and the broad and deep acceptance by the Filipino voters themselves of the outcome of the first two computerized polls, as borne out by the results of the tracking polls of the country’s most credible pollsters Social Weather Stations (SWS), Pulse Asia and StratPOLLS.