Last batch of poll machines to arrive Saturday

The last shipment of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines that will be used in the May polls will finally arrive on Saturday, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Friday. In an interview with reporters, Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said that 7,000 PCOS units are due to arrive on Friday while 6,000 will be delivered on Saturday from Suzhou, China where the machines were manufactured. Earlier, the poll body said that all the machines would be delivered by Friday. (See: Comelec: All poll machines delivered by Friday) But Larrazabal said that there was a delay in the delivery because of shipping conditions. "There was a delay in the vessel, there was a delay when it set sail," he said. The supplier, Smartmatic-TIM, had earlier said that the delivery of the PCOS machines would be completed by February 21 or a week before the real deadline. The commissioner thus said that the consortium will be slapped with a fine of P7.5 million for evey day it misses the February 28 deadline. On Thursday, Comelec chairman Jose Melo said that more than 68,000 PCOS units are already being stored at warehouse of poll machine supplier Smartmatic-TIM's in Cabuyao, Laguna where they have to undergo a series of tests. (See: More than half of voting machines pass tests, Comelec says) Comelec awarded Smartmatic with the P7.2-billion contract to produce 82,200 PCOS machines and a P243-million contract to manufacture the ballot boxes for the May elections. Only about 76,000 of the 82,200 purchased poll machines will be used in the coming polls because each clustered precinct will need only one unit. The rest will be used as spares. There are 76,340 clustered precincts. As of February 25, a total of 6,037,038 ballots have been printed by the Comelec, which remains a low percentage when compared to the 50,723,734 registered voters who will use them. —JV, GMANews.TV