Senate restores P500-M budget for poll result transmission

MANILA, Philippines - A day after slashing a P500-million insertion by the House of Representatives in the 2016 budget of the Commission on Elections for the transmission of poll results in next year’s elections, the Senate has restored the amount after realizing it was justified.

Last Wednesday, Senate committee on finance chairperson Loren Legarda removed the P500-million increase in the Comelec budget for the Electronic Results Transmission Solution, Management and Services approved by the House, which she deemed was not needed.

This was because the Comelec already had a P557.6-million allocation in the 2016 national budget for the transmission of poll results.

Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista appealed the decision of the committee on finance through a letter to Senate President Franklin Drilon on the same day, saying that the P500 million would be used to improve the 76.35 percent transmission rate recorded in the 2013 elections.

Bautista told reporters that the House approved the additional P500 million during its budget deliberations earlier this year in response to the desire to improve the transmission rate recorded in the 2013 polls.

He noted that the transmission rate was 90 percent in the 2010 elections, but this went down to 76.35 percent in the 2013 senatorial elections.

Bautista said that the additional P500 million is needed with the expected increase in the number of clustered precincts for the 2016 national and local elections and the increase in the number of satellite devices that will be used.

“The key is with more satellites, the greater chances of transmission because there are many areas in the country that have no signal. With P558 million, the number of satellite devices is around 4,000. To improve this we need to double this,” Bautista said.

“We all know that the slow delivery of results raises negative speculations,” he added.

Bautista noted that under the terms or reference for the transmission services, the provider is supposed to transmit the results within 24 hours.

For the 2016 elections, Bautista said that the Comelec wants it to be within a few hours only.

Agreeing with the position of the Comelec and the decision of the House, Drilon reinstated the P500 million in the budget of the poll body as his own amendment in the national budget.