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Five thousand ballot boxes arrive from Taiwan, Comelec says


The first batch of ballot boxes to be used for the Philippines’ historic automated polls has arrived in the country, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said on Wednesday. Five thousand of the 77,000 ballot boxes have been delivered from Taiwan, Comelec Commssioner Gregorio Larrazabal said in an interview with reporters. An additional 5,000 ballot boxes are expected to arrive tomorrow, he added. “[I]n the coming days and weeks, we'll have continuous delivery of ballot boxes to the Philippines," he said after inspecting the ballot boxes at the Foreign Service Mail Distribution Center (FSMDC) in Manila.

Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal inspects the first batch of 5,000 ballot boxes to be used for the Philippines’ first automated polls. Another batch of 5,000 boxes are expected to be delivered on Thursday. Kim Tan, GMANews.TV
In a separate interview, Comelec legal officer IV Vina Zamora told reporters that the first batch of ballot boxes actually arrived last week but were only released by the Bureau of Customs on Tuesday. Larrazabal said that the ballot boxes will remain at the FSMDC warehouse until they have to be shipped out with the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines to the different provinces by mid-April. The commissioner clarified that they only manufactured 77,000 ballot boxes because about 6,000 of the 82,200 poll machines are just spares and do not actually need ballot boxes. There are 76,340 clustered precincts, each of which will use only one PCOS unit. The poll body inked a separate P243-million contract with poll machine supplier Smartmatic-TIM for the manufacturing of the ballot boxes. It also awarded the P7.2 billion contract to automate the May polls to the consortium. In the meantime, the Comelec has enlisted the services of forwarding firms Germalin Enterprises, Ace Logistics, and Argo Forwarders for the transportation of the poll machines and ballot boxes. Germalin will take care of the deliveries in the National Capital Region, Ace will be in charge of Luzon, and Argo will deliver to Visayas and Mindanao. Comelec chairman Jose Melo said the agency has decided to leave the delivery of all the election materials to the three companies so that there will be no more confusion, just like how it awarded the contract to manufacture the ballot boxes to poll machine supplier Smartmatic-TIM. In a separate interview, Smartmatic Asia President Cesar Flores said the ballot boxes are made of thermoplastic polymer material Polypropylene. The new ballot box design is 34 inches in height, 36 inches in length, and 20 inches in width. It is black instead of transparent in order to protect the UV markings on the ballots, which will prove its authenticity. Larrazabal said that although the plastic ballot box is "durable," it is not fire-proof. "If you burn it, it will burn, it's plastic," he said. Unlike the voting machines, Flores said that the ballot boxes are not precinct-specific. "The ballot boxes are generic," he said. He was quick to note that people wouldn't have to worry about ballot box snatching during the automated polls because the results will be electronically transmitted right after voting closes. "The ballots becomes an audit tool, a way to recount and audit," he said. - RJAB Jr., GMANews.TV
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