Suspicious Gordon wants Comelec budget reconciled

MANILA, Philippines – Sen. Richard Gordon has asked the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to go back to the drawing board and reconfigure its proposed budget for the full automation of the May 2010 national and local elections.

Gordon became suspicious of sinister efforts by some quarters to thwart the full election automation effort in 2010 when the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on Automated Election System met with Comelec officials last Wednesday.

He said the Comelec should reconcile glaring discrepancies between its original and revised budget proposals submitted to the budget department and Congress.

“There seems to be an attempt by certain unscrupulous people in Comelec to prevent the automation of elections by making it appear as not feasible,” he said, adding that it was ridiculous for the Comelec to submit five different budget proposals.

The Comelec earlier announced it has readied five different budget proposals for the full election automation, the highest of which amounts to P61 billion and the lowest P3.4 billion.

However, at the Senate hearing, Gordon was surprised that the Comelec presented a P9.7-billion budget for the automated election, which relies on the use of Optical Mark Reader (OMR) voting machines in 85 percent of the country’s precincts, and 15 percent of the precincts would have Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) or touch screen voting machines.

According to Gordon, the use of mostly OMR voting machines would not satisfy the objectives of fast, clean elections. He added that he prefers DRE over OMR because the latter is more susceptible to cheating compared to DRE machines. The DRE machines would be used in Metro Manila, Metro Cebu and Metro Davao.

DRE machines allow voting through a touch-screen or touch-pad, while OMR machines require voters to fill up a paper ballot which is then counted by a specially designed machine.

“Comelec itself has said that OMR is prone to tampering and is much slower than DRE. Going heavy on OMR in 2010 will defeat our objective of having fast and clean elections,” Gordon stressed.

“Every step of the way we have to coax the Comelec to stay the course and not be afraid of the cost, because it is up to Congress really to produce the money. That is why they have to come back and come up with the real budget for a fast and very accurate system which cannot be tampered with,” he added.