Congress urged to pass poll automation budget

MANILA, Philippines - Sen. Richard Gordon reiterated yesterday his call for other lawmakers to pass the P11.3-billion supplemental budget for the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to implement a fully automated system in the next elections.

Gordon, author of the poll automation law, said Congress must not fail the Filipino people in their dream of having clean, honest, and credible elections in May 2010 and that this can only be achieved by removing all impediments to the holding of automated elections.

He made the call amid the moves at the House of Representatives seeking for the conduct of a hybrid polls instead. Hybrid system is the exercise of having automated elections in the national level and manual polls in the local level.

“The people have, for so long, cherished the dream of having clean, honest and credible elections. Poll automation sends a strong signal that wholesale cheating that often marred the country’s electoral exercises would no longer be easily carried out,” he said in a statement.

“We should not disappoint our countrymen. It is within the power of Congress to pave the way for an automated election that would erase public suspicion that the Filipino people’s sacrosanct votes would be stolen from them,” said Gordon, who ran under the administration coalition in 2004.

The Comelec has asked Congress for P11.3-billion supplemental budget for the planned automation of the 2010 presidential elections.

The poll body is considering the use of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) technology, an improved Optical Mark Reader (OMR) system that was used along with the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) technology in the August 2008 automated elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.