MANILA, Philippines - The Commission on Elections (Comelec) awarded another contract to multinational tech company Smartmatic, this time for the supply of compact flash (CF) cards for the May elections.
After a bidding between two other companies, the agency chose to Smartmatic to supply P45.4 million worth of cards even though the corporation did not bid for the said contract.
Smartmatic, which will provide 82,200 units of CF cards priced at P550 each, had also been earlier awarded a P486.5-million contract for electronic transmission of election results and about P155 million for modems to be used to transmit election data to servers.
The pre-programmed CF devices will be placed inside the precinct count optical scan or PCOS machines with instructions on how to process ballot readings and store ballot images.
Comelec said the two suppliers LDLA Marketing, Inc. and Unison Computer Systems, Inc. lost the bidding for failing to comply with technical and legal requirements of the polling body.