Nograles to Comelec: Don’t pay Smartmatic-TIM yet

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) should not make the final payment to Smartmatic-Total Information Management Corp. (Smartmatic-TIM), supplier of the vote counting machines in the country’s first nationwide automated elections, until after country is assured that the May 10 polls were indeed a success, House Speaker Prospero Nograles said Sunday. “[The Comelec] should not fully pay Smartmatic until such time as [when the] Congress joint oversight committee [on poll automation] can give the public a clean bill of health about the first automated polls," according to a text message sent by the office of Nograles. Smartmatic is the foreign partner of Filipino company TIM, the consortium which bagged the P7.2-billion Comelec contract to automate the May 10 elections. “It is hard exactly to say how much" the commission had already paid Smartmatic-TIM of the P7.2-billion, because the financial report is yet to be made final, Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said in a separate text message to GMANews.TV. “More realistically, what we can do is withhold the release of the performance bonds," Jimenez said. Smartmatic-TIM had to recall and reconfigure the compact flash cards in the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines a week before the elections as the machines were not able to read some of the test ballots. In some cases, the machines transmitted the wrong data, attributing votes to candidates whose names were not ticked on the test ballot. Many of the glitch-filled PCOS machines caused major delays in polling places on May 10, compelling the Comelec to extend the 11-hour voting period by an hour to 7 p.m. Leading presidential contender Sen. Benigno Aquino had to line up for hours in the polling precinct in Tarlac City, where he was registered, after the PCOS machine lost power after it was turned on. —With Kimberly Tan/VS, GMANews.TV