Winning bidder to complete vote-count in 2 days

The consortium of Smartmatic and Total Information Management (TIM) that won the bidding for the May 10, 2010 poll automation project has committed to complete the canvassing and counting of votes not less than two days.

“We are comfortable that within one or two days, we will have all the results for all the positions, nationwide,” said Smartmatic Sales Director Cesar Flores during the release of the P11.3 billion Notice of Award Tuesday at the Commission on Elections (Comelec) main office.

The Comelec’s Special Bids and Awards Committee officially recommended to the en banc the awarding of the poll automation contract to Smartmatic/TIM last June 3 for entering a bid of P7.2 billion lower than their ceiling price.

But Flores stressed they would maintain all levels of transmission as mandated by Philippine laws, that is, all the transmission results from the precinct level up to the city/municipal, provincial and national.

Antonio Mugica, Smartmatic’s chief executive officer, also said they intended to follow the laws as well as the rules set by the Comelec. “We will follow what the Comelec will tell us. The rules of the Comelec are set and the technology will enforce it,” Mugica said.

Citing their previous election experiences overseas, Mugica said 80 percent of the results were already made available within five to six hours after the closing of the voting period.

“The remaining 10 percent might take a little longer, though,” he admitted.

Flores said the winning consortium would guarantee that the 2010 election results would be credible and secure. “We guarantee that the data won’t be altered and that not a single vote will be changed. We guarantee that through this system that every vote will be counted correctly and no alterations will be done by anyone,” he added.

Mugica bolstered Flores’ claims, saying that “in our past projects, we have transmitted about a 150 million votes and not even one vote had ever been tampered… that includes the US and Latin America,” Mugica said.

The country is set to use the Precinct Counting Optical Scan (PCOS) system in the next elections. The Comelec will least at least 82,200 machines to expedite the vote counting in 2010.

Smatmatic said around 75 percent or roughly P5 billion of their P7.2 billion bid offer would be used for the acquisition of the ballots, computers and other election paraphernalia also known as “cost of goods” while the remaining P2 billion would cover the “cost of services” particularly for salaries, transportation and other operational expenses.

The PCOS is a paper-based voting system, wherein marked ballots will be fed into a scanning machine that records the votes and electronically tallies them. Ballots are then stored in a box under the machines while the results are automatically transmitted.

The Netherlands-based Smartmatic also has presence in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Barbados, Spain, Taiwan and the Philippines.

TIM is a Filipino solutions company established in 1985 with banks as its major clients.

On the issues raisd against them, Mugica “whenever you’re trying to make elections cleaner and more transparent, you will find resistance. There are people who will feel threatened by cleaner and transparent elections. We will find critics and we will find attacks. Be aware that many of those have something to with (tampering) and that’s what we have to fight against and that’s the whole reason we are doing this.”

Specifically, the Smartmatic explained the unfortunate incident that happened during the demonstration of their machines last May 28, 2009 where their cable wires overheated.

“Smoke, although it has no sound, made a lot of noise. We did made a big mistake in bringing in the wrong wire but again what short circuited was not the machine, not the battery,” Flores said.

“It was an unfortunate accident that happened at that point a time, which we hope had not happened and that will not happen again,” Mugica said.

The winning bidders said they would use set of high-quality cables as soon as they they deploy their machines.

In the next two to four weeks, the Comelec and Smartmatic/TIM are set to negotiate on the details of the contract.

The negotiations will zero in on the project’s master plan, on how to establish an intense communication plan and on how the system will adapt to the law, situations and weather conditions. –Marie A. Surbano, Daily Tribune