Yearender: Banner year for Comelec after first ever auto polls

MANILA, Philippines - 2010 was a banner year for the Commission on Elections (Comelec), primarily due to the success of the country’s first automated polls last May 10.

The elections may have been marred by some questions but for Comelec officials, they accomplished what they were tasked to do – speed up the electoral process and elect a president whose victory was beyond doubt.

“2010 is a flag year for the Comelec. Despite all the negative beliefs of the people surrounding us, the automation pushed through. There were no serious challenges to the wins of the winning candidates,” said Comelec spokesman James Jimenez.

He said if there are protest cases filed against winning candidates, “most of them are founded on the distrust of the system which is unavoidable because this is a new system.”

“So until we get evidence that there was something wrong in the automation, that the counting of the machines was not accurate, there’s no reason not to call it a success,” Jimenez said.

Rough sailing

The Comelec went through rough sailing before it was able to automate the May 10 local and national polls.

The poll body met strong opposition from some civil society groups and information technology experts who were against the automated election system (AES).

Still, the agency prevailed in its automation project and used the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines supplied by the Netherlands-based Smartmatic International Corp. and its Filipino partner Total Information Management Corp. with a P7.2-billion contract.

But close to election day, the Comelec had to do some damage control when the ballot secrecy folders that its Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) had planned to purchase from OTC Paper Supply were found overpriced at P320 each or a total of P689 million.

This led the Office of the Ombudsman to suspend the BAC members and Comelec executive director Jose Tolentino Jr. for six months while graft charges are pending against them.

The Comelec also ran into another controversy when it had to turn off the ultraviolet ink reader of the PCOS machines after they failed to read the security marking in the ballots. This prompted the poll body to buy portable UV ink lamps worth P30 million.

Misconfigured

On the eve of election day, many of the compact flash (CF) cards used in the PCOS machines were found to have been misconfigured. The CF cards contained the names of the voters and candidates in a particular precinct so they cannot be interchanged. Smartmatic had to either reconfigure the cards or replace them with new ones.

On election day, voters were infuriated by long queues at the polling precincts. This was a result of the configuration of two to five precincts into one precinct to maximize the PCOS machines.

But as expected, the Comelec was able to announce who won in the presidential and vice-presidential derby two days after the election.

In previous manual polls, it took up to three weeks to determine the country’s top two new officials.

While results were available in two days’ time, however, the proclamation of winners was delayed due to some procedural requirements of election laws.

Election results could be transmitted automatically from polling precincts but they had to be canvassed first in a “ladderized” process by going through the municipality/city board of canvassers and the provincial board of canvassers before they were sent to the Comelec which convened as the National Board of Canvassers.

This prolonged the automated electoral process.

Controversial candidates

The Comelec also had to contend with the howls of protest triggered by the nomination to the party-list race of some government officials and scions of affluent families.

Among them were former presidential son and former Pampanga congressman Juan Miguel Arroyo and former Energy secretary Angelo Reyes, who were nominees of party-list groups Ang Galing Pinoy (AGP) and One United Transport Koalisyon (UTAK).

The multi-sector group Kotra-Daya filed petitions before the Comelec seeking the disqualification of Reyes and Arroyo.

Kontra-Daya believed that the party-list system was being bastardized with the nomination of Arroyo and Reyes.

It argued that the two do not belong to AGP and 1-Utak which are supposed to represent the marginalized and underrepresented sectors of security guards and public utility drivers in Congress, respectively.

But the Comelec junked Kontra-Daya’s petitions and the two party-list groups each won one seat in the House.

Barangay and SK polls

Despite the success of the May 10 automated polls, the Comelec decided to go back to the manual system during the synchronized barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) polls last Oct. 25.

The Comelec rationalized its decision, saying there is no need to consolidate votes on a nationwide scale in the twin polls.

But before the Comelec was able to go full blast in the preparation for the barangay and SK elections, it had to do some balancing acts due to calls from some congressmen, senators and certain groups to either postpone or cancel the polls because it was too near the May 10 presidential election.

But two months before the scheduled polls, the Comelec was finally given the green light to push through with the synchronized elections.

Prior to election day, typhoon “Juan” wrought havoc in the north, damaging some schools and rendering some roads inaccessible to motorists. This forced the Comelec to postpone the polls in these areas.

But even without a typhoon, the conduct of elections was also delayed in close to 2,463 barangays across the country due to the late delivery of election paraphernalia.

The Comelec created a fact-finding panel to investigate the matter as some poll employees reportedly sabotaged the shipment of paraphernalia to make money.

When the supplies were left by the forwarders, the employees allegedly brought the paraphernalia to the precincts, enabling them to get cash advances.