Comelec mulls buying 487 PCOS units for $4M

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Monday said it is considering buying 487 of the 82,200 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines used in the May 10 automated polls for $4 million or about P185 million. In an interview with reporters, Comelec chairman Jose Melo said they are considering to purchase the machines from Smartmatic-TIM for the conduct of special elections in some areas in the country. Melo said they need the voting machines for the resolution of some electoral protests filed with the poll body. He said the worth of the purchase would probably amount to $4 million or P185,442,403.62 based on the current exchange rate of $1 to P46. "(This) includes (the) payment of Smartmatic for conducting the special elections," Melo said. The Comelec awarded Smartmatic-TIM the P7.2-billion contract to automate the recent elections. It also paid the consortium an additional P21 million for the conduct of some special elections earlier in the month. However, there are still several pending petitions to conduct special elections in areas all over the country, particularly in Mindanao. 'Good investment' Smartmatic Asia president Cesar Flores had said that purchasing all of the 82,200 machines would be a "good investment" for the Comelec because it would only cost them P2 billion. Melo, however, said that what discouraged them from buying all of the machines was their desire not to be "tied down" to the technology and the technology provider. "We don't want to be tied down to PCOS, to Smartmatic. We don't want to be tied down, (maybe) in three years there might be a great leap in technology," he said. Instead, he said they might go through another bidding to find a better automated election system for the 2013 national elections. Stick with PCOS Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal, who headed the poll body's steering committee on poll automation, had said that he would prefer to stick with the PCOS system. Larrazabal said the only thing that would probably change are the size of the font and ovals on the ballot. The country used 25-inch ballots in the May polls, which were fed to PCOS units that counted and transmitted the results to different servers. A few days before the elections, however, some machines failed to read votes accurately, forcing Smartmatic to pull out and replace the compact flash cards of all the voting machines deployed all over the country. — Kimberly Jane Tan/RSJ/KBK, GMANews.TV