EDITORIAL - Work double time - Philippine Star

There was general agreement yesterday among Malacañang, Congress and the Commission on Elections that the 2016 polls must be held as scheduled. What’s uncertain is whether the Comelec can still conduct fully automated elections, after the Supreme Court invalidated the other day a P268.8-million refurbishment contract awarded to the company that provided the voting machines.

In its unanimous decision, the high tribunal noted that the contract was awarded without public bidding to Smartmatic-Total Information Management. The deal was signed just days before Sixto Brillantes Jr. ended his stint as Comelec chairman. Explaining the lack of public bidding, the poll body had argued that the refurbishment was just an extension of the supply contract won by Smartmatic-TIM, which provided the more than 81,000 precinct count optical scan or PCOS machines used in the 2010 and 2013 elections.

The Comelec has raised the specter of a return to manual elections, while some quarters are proposing a combination of manual voting and computerized count. Both are prohibited under Republic Act 9369 or the law on poll automation, according to several leaders of Congress, but Comelec officials believe otherwise.

Poll officials may be right, but they must not give up trying to carry out their mandate under RA 9369. There is still time to hold a public bidding for the refurbishment. The bidding can be monitored by interested parties and poll watchdogs so that the results need not be challenged by losers all the way to the Supreme Court. The Comelec still has other poll-related contracts to award, even as it considers switching to the use of 23,000 optical mark readers. The OMRs will be installed at canvassing centers instead of individual voting precincts.

Politicians have mastered the numerous ways by which the vote can be manipulated in manual elections. Candidates for practically all positions including the presidency have complained of being victims of vote shaving and padding. Vote buying is also facilitated in a manual vote, with the equivalent of a receipt submitted to the vote buyer. Manual voting also encourages election violence as ballot boxes are snatched, often at gunpoint.

Another major complaint in a manual vote is the counting, with Filipinos groaning that it must be the slowest count in the world. It’s unlikely that the nation will accept a return to a manual vote count. The elections must push through as scheduled in May 2016, with poll officials working double time to make sure it happens. And there must be no wavering in the commitment to make the elections as clean, orderly and credible as possible.

Opinion ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1

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