Only 15% of PCOS machines ready for work 3 hours after polls open

Three hours after the 7 a.m. opening of polls on Monday, only 11,942 of the 76,347 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines nationwide were installed, Smartmatic figures revealed. The figure represents 15.65 percent of the total number of machines that were installed and ready for work as of 10 a.m., according to Smartmatic's Election Day Management Platform (EDMP), which provides real-time updates of PCOS opening and closing at poll centers. While admitting that Smartmatic's figures were coming in slow, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said that this was due to slow, slow reporting from the machine supplier's technicians deployed at polling places nationwide to install the machines. "The updating of technicians is quite slow because they might not be able to report immediately to the central command center. Actual figures are probably higher than that," said Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez, who did not give exact figures as to the total numbers of machines that were installed so far. However, the open voting figures, which record the number of precincts nationwide that have officially opened for voting, were at 9.06 percent, representing 6,917 precincts, as of 10:00 a.m. The poll body earlier said poll readiness is at 98 percent, with all the PCOS machines and Compact Flash cards having already reached their destinations. — Nikka Corsino/LBG/RSJ, GMANews.TV