Comelec to train teachers on automated poll system

MANILA, Philippines - Teachers serving in the May 13 polls will be trained on the automated election system to acquaint them with the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines.

Helen Aquila-Flores, Commission on Elections (Comelec) personnel department acting head, said all teachers comprising the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) will undergo the training.

“They will all be trained. It is required under the law that one of the them must be certified as technologically capable to use the machines,” she said.

Comelec records show that 233,712 teachers comprise the BEIs manning each of the 77,904 polling precincts nationwide.

Flores said it may take two days to train the BEIs, but if the random manual audit team and the technical support staff will be included in the training, this may be extended up to four days.

The Comelec will sign a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) for the training program, she added.

In the 2010 polls, the technical support people were provided by Smartmatic International Corp., which leased out the PCOS machines to the Comelec.

The Comelec has procured the machines for use in this year’s elections.

The Comelec disclosed yesterday that the reshuffle of 90 percent of election officers would be completed in time for the May 13 polls to avoid familiarity of poll officials with local candidates.

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes admitted that there is an ongoing reorganization of regional directors down to provincial election supervisors.

Batangas Rep. Tomas Apacible raised the issue of the Comelec reshuffle during the hearing yesterday of the Joint Oversight Committee on Automated Election System after receiving several telephone calls about local poll officers.

He said that his political opponents have been accusing him of orchestrating the reshuffle of poll officers so that he would be reelected.

“We’ve been very quiet because we don’t want to announce the reshuffling. I know that all of the politicians and all of the candidates will be affected,” Brillantes said.

Many complaints of poll fraud during the previous administration involved erring election officers who supposedly connived with politicians to rig the results of the elections.

Some of the poll officers have been assigned to the same region or province for a long time and have raised suspicion that they have developed close relations with local politicians.

Brillantes said that the Comelec intentionally kept the reshuffle quiet to avoid lobbying from local politicians.

“We don’t want to give advance notice to the politicians because if we tell them that we will be reshuffling, then I will be receiving calls from all the mayors, governors, congressmen every day and I will not be able to work anymore because they will be saying, don’t reshuffle this, don’t take this out, don’t post him here, put this guy in this place. That’s why we have been very quiet about this,” Brillantes said.

During the hearing yesterday, Brillantes lost his cool after hearing the concerns raised by election watchdogs AES Watch and CenPeg that continued to question the reliability and integrity of the PCOS machines and the source code used.

He said the two groups have raised the same issues since 2010 when the first automated polls were held in the country.

The two groups criticized the Comelec for not informing them about their actions regarding the certification of the source code and other matters related to the use of PCOS machines.

Brillantes said that it is not his obligation to report to these groups and even threatened to walk out of yesterday’s proceedings if they continued to bug him about those issues.

Comelec rejects manual polls

The Comelec chief also rejected calls to revert to the manual system for the May 13 polls.

“We won’t go back to manual. The law requires automated election,” Brillantes told Comelec reporters.

Brillantes said manual election is just the “final contingency” of the Comelec in an “extreme situation.”

House Minority Leader Danilo Suarez had proposed last Wednesday during the hearing of the joint congressional oversight committee that the Comelec do away with automated polls in May in view of the glitches encountered during the agency’s mock elections last Feb. 2.

Some poll watchdogs have also questioned the accuracy of the PCOS machines, claiming the Comelec had failed to address their deficiencies and flaws during the 2010 elections.

Brillantes said the Comelec had also prepared contingency measures in case the agency had to go back to the manual system.

“But we are not focusing on that because we strongly believe that there won’t be a need to revert back to manual,” he noted.

He said the automation of elections is provided for in Republic Act 9369 so the law would have to be amended if the polls would be done manually.

Three days after the printing of official ballots last Feb. 4, the Comelec said that some 1.1 million ballots have already been printed at the National Printing Office (NPO) in Quezon City.

Brillantes said the printing of ballots for South Cotabato and North Cotabato had already been completed.

“Some 1.1 million ballots have already been printed which is too small. From what I know, the ballots for South Cotabato and North Cotabato are already complete,” he noted.

The Comelec had contracted the NPO to print a total of 52,017,360 ballots in 90 days or until April 25.

Three modern printers are being used for the project and each of them could print 314 ballots per minute or a total of up to one million ballots per day to each machine. 

Meanwhile, 13 companies have expressed intention to join the bidding for the P231.2-million contract to supply indelible ink, plastic seals for the ballot boxes and other election requirements.

The firms were identified as Vibal Publishing House Inc., Noah’s Paper Mills Inc., Printwell Inc., AGP Trading Inc., Trojan Marketing Inc., ASA Color & Chemical Industries Inc., Topbest Printing Corp., Texas Resources Corp., Neutron Const. and Marketing Corp., Ernest Printing Corp., Book Media Press Inc., Lexton Commercial Marketing Corp., and Bian-John Office Supplies & Gen. Merchandise.

In yesterday’s pre-bid conference, representatives of the firms were allowed by the Comelec’s Regular Bids and Awards Committee (RBAC) to ask questions about the contracts.– With Marvin Sy