Comelec–7 RD hopes for more poll budget

CEBU, Philippines - To minimize technical problems and to decongest polling precincts, a Commission of Election (Comelec) official suggested a centralized counting center during elections.

Atty. Ferdinand Gujilde, the chairman of the City Board of Canvassers (BOC), said that the 200 voters per precinct must be retained and that they will vote manually.

Then, the official ballots are gathered and these will be fed in one centralized counting center.

“This will decongest the polling precincts.  If this will be done, then there will be less machines used and less trouble. We already tried that once and it’s successful,” Gujilde added.

However, Comelec Regional Director Atty. Temie Lambino does not agree with Gujilde’s suggestion.

“Somehow it is risky if we will have centralized counting center because those that come from far flung precincts need to be transported and there might be bad elements that will intervene once these ballots will be taken to the centralized center,” Lambino said.

Lambino believed that the best solution is to allocate more budget so more machines will be available and more manpower can serve during elections.

Lambino said that this year, Comelec has P7 billion budget and 82,000 machines were purchased, which means a ratio of 1,000 voters to one PCOS machine.

In 2010, the budget was P13 billion but congress cut the budget for this year’s elections.

He said that if the number of machines will be doubled or tripled, the number of voters per precinct will also be lessened.

“If we have more budget for the elections, there will be more people to hire and more machines to use,” Lambino said.

The delay in the release of the budget that subsequently caused delay in the purchase of election paraphernalia also caused problem.

He believed that if Comelec has one year to prepare for the elections,  the CF cards can be checked properly.

Lambino added that the delivery of the replacement CF cards was also delayed since there was no enough people to do the reprogramming of the cards.

“Everything revolves around the budget. It goes to the budget, how much budget allotted and the time of the release of the budget,” Lambino said. —/MBG (FREEMAN)