No UV lamps yet for May polls, Comelec says

With only 11 days before the automated polls, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) confirmed on Thursday that it has yet to award the contract for the supply and delivery of the ultraviolet (UV) lamps that will be used to verify ballots’ authenticity during elections. The contract for the supply and delivery of 80,000 UV lamps for the 76,340 clustered precincts in the May polls "has yet to be awarded," Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said. "There have been no award of the UV lamps yet. It's kind of rattled, I guess," he told reporters in an interview on Thursday. An estimated P30 million has been allotted for the procurement, Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said. Earlier, the poll body rebidded the awarding of the contract when the bidders failed to submit the required shipping schedule. Three companies were vying for the UV lamp contract, including OTC Paper Supply, the company that was awarded the botched P690-million ballot secrecy folder contract. The other bidders were Embu Integrated and Philand Industries. OTC offered the lowest bid of P28 million. The absence of a UV lamp supplier as of the moment should not be a cause for alarm, Jimenez said. "Not to worry. You have to understand that the UV lamps are not manufactured specifically for the Comelec so there's really no issue there. They can be procured rather easily," he said. He said that the agency is just undergoing the post-qualification stage of the bidding before they can award the contract. "Again, no urgency, we will have the UV lamps on time," he said. Earlier, the Comelec said that it will be using handheld UV lamps to verify the authenticity of the ballot after the high-speed printing of the ballots caused the UV marks to misalign, making it hard for the PCOS machine to read the security feature. But political analyst Ramon Casiple, a member of the Comelec Advisory Council, disclosed that the voting machines could not read the security features because Smartmatic-TIM actually failed to supply the correct ink for the UV marks. - RJAB Jr., GMANews.TV