AT THE first-ever Meet Inquirer Multimedia forum last week, Commission on Elections Chair Andres Bautista said that the Comelec had given itself until July 31 to make the all-important decision: what form the automated elections in 2016 would take. He outlined three options, but since then he and other election officials have publicly ruled out the third option, which was the partially automated, partially manual alternative. One of the two remaining options requires a recalculation of the “approved budget of the contract” (ABC) and a rebidding; the commission itself continues to face petitions pending at the Supreme Court. While the new chair (Bautista’s term began in May) is to be commended for emphasizing transparency, which helps explain the deliberate pace of the agency’s weighing of options, the election clock is ticking, and ticking ever louder.
Is there enough time for the Comelec to mount a successful, honest, credible, automated election by May 9, 2016?
At least the partial option, the so-called hybrid voting, is off the table, for now. Perhaps some citizens have entertained the notion that in view of the continuing controversy over the role of Smartmatic as service provider in the 2010 elections, the part-automated, part manual alternative was the solution. But both at the Inquirer forum and before the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms, Commissioner Christian Robert Lim shared the agency’s cost estimates for the partial option, and they are billions of pesos greater than the two other options. The estimates need to be vetted to the detail, but the assumptions behind them certainly sound reasonable. Instead of halving costs, the partial option would be more likely to double them, in large part because the process requires more manpower over a longer period of time.
Cost is not the only consideration. Lim pointed to three other factors: Hybrid voting will require new legislation, will be time-intensive and vulnerable to human error, and will need new software to be developed. Given all these, and the reality of a shrinking calendar (the elections are 10 months away), it is good that the hybrid alternative has been removed from the discussion board, at least for the next vote. As Bautista told reporters over the weekend: “We’re still open to use the system in future elections. We should remember that we’re short of time. If we are talking about 2016, it’s too late.”
What about the two other options?
The option to lease new optical mark readers (OMRs) is still a live one, but Bautista has signaled that perhaps the third option, refurbishing the 82,000 precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines used in 2010, is best. But this process has problems too; controversially, the first round of bidding failed. After the ABC was reduced from P2.880 billion to P2.074 billion, no company submitted a bid.
“The [commission] en banc is looking at ways by which we can revive the bidding and we are considering increasing the approved budget of the contract,” Bautista said on Friday, “but no decision has been made yet.” He said the agency was giving serious consideration to the feedback from the potential service providers. “There were those who said that the ABC was too low. We will review the budget internally.”
Comelec officials are sanguine about the petitions already pending at the Supreme Court, but launching a second round of bidding for the refurbishing of the existing PCOS machines may yet inspire more lawsuits. While most reasonable people will agree with Bautista’s description of the latest petition—that it was “odd” for petitioners, who had just last April won a Supreme Court ruling stopping the Comelec from implementing a direct contracting resolution, to try to stop the Comelec precisely from conducting new and transparent biddings—the possibility of yet more lawsuits is worrying.
Let us all hope that the emphasis Bautista and the other commissioners are placing on transparency, even to the extent of agreeing to make en banc minutes public, may prove to be the agency’s best defense and, in the end, help the Supreme Court reach a timely decision.
As Bautista rightly said, conducting the next national elections on May 9, 2016, is the true non-negotiable.