What’s delaying the Comelec ID system?

If one faction of the Comelec is perceived to have a decision-broker and a bellicose leader, the other side is . . . well, you be the judge.

Two electoral-reform laws urgently call for modernizing the system. The first, passed in 1997 with an initial fund of P2.5 billion, tasks Comelec to remap polling precincts while at the same time relisting voters through tamper-proof ID cards. The other, passed months later, requires Comelec to automate and thus speed up ballot counting.

Remapping would put sense in assigning voters to precincts. Except for Metro Manila and some cities, the present assignment is alphabetical – a carry-over from farce elections under Ferdinand Marcos’s martial rule. This prevents voters from challenging flying voters, since they don’t know each other. With remapping, voters would be reassigned to precincts by street blocks. Voters in each precinct would be neighbors, and thus know each other.

Relisting would finally purge multiple- and long-dead registrants. Under a Voter Registration and Identification System, each voter would go to his barangay for photographing, fingerprinting, and issuance of an ID card. Same with new registrants, or old ones with new residence. Each voter’s name, photograph, fingerprint, address and precinct number would go into a central computer file that would check for fraud. No flying voter would ever be able to sell his vote again. As a bonus, absentee-voting would become possible. Six to seven million members of the middle class – astute voters who are working abroad – will be able to cast their ballots, even if only for national officials.

Automation would be the finishing touch. On Election Day, a voter will simply swipe his ID card on an electronic verification machine to enter his precinct. No more long wait for poll clerks to look for his name. Too, he will no longer have to fill in long lists of candidates, but simply dot the boxes beside the names. Voting time would be cut from the present 23 minutes to only five. Ballots would then be stacked into counting machines that can finish in minutes. No longer will the nation be made to wait for months to find out who their new President or governor or mayor is.

In short, remapping, relisting and automation will stop the decades-old dirty tricks of flying-voting, lansadera or cadena de amor vote-buying, double-counting, and dagdag-bawas or vote-shaving and -padding. It will lessen the chances of ballot-snatching and terrorism. Too, it will solve the usual mess of missing names and precincts. We will have a one voter-one ballot-one count system.

For the system to work, remapping, relisting and automation have to be done in tandem. It cannot be just one or two, but all three together. But that’s where the problem is at present in the Comelec.

For four months now, Chairman Alfredo Benipayo has been foot-dragging on precinct mapping. Commissioner Luzviminda Tancangco had begun the work in November, which she had hoped to finish in time for last May 14’s congressional-local election. But the Comelec directed her to stop the project late last March, and just resume it after the election. The result: untold numbers of disenfranchised voters who couldn’t locate their precincts, much less their names in old 1998 computerized voters lists that Benipayo said were "relatively clean." To this day, Tancangco has yet to get funds to resume her work.

Too, Benipayo has refused to implement the law on relisting under a Voter Registration and Identification System. At first, he claimed there’s no money for it. Yet as far back as September 2000, Comelec had conducted a bidding based on its own specifications and initial budget from Congress of P2.5 billion. A consortium of US firms Unisys, Polaroid and IBM, with local partner Photokina, had won with the lowest bid of P1.9 billion for the first of two phases that would total P6.5 billion. That bid in fact left Comelec with enough savings to start Tancangco’s mapping in November.

Informed about the history of VRIS technical studies, bidding and awarding, Benipayo changed his tune. He said he couldn’t go on with the contract because he knew nothing about how the ID system would work. Yet gathering dust in Comelec shelves are the very recommendations of the senior technical staff, along with how the consortium had done it before in other countries.

Benipayo has given other reasons for his reluctance. He said that his predecessor Harriet Demetriou had found the P1.9-billion price excessive since the original Comelec budget for Phase 1 was only for P1.2 billion. To this, the consortium replied that Comelec had thrown in certain works for Phase 2, which all the dozen or so participating bidders knew. Benipayo added that Demetriou had said in press statements that she thought the bidding was fraudulent. To this the consortium asked why it was awarded the contract if the bidding was marred. And where is the Comelec report, if any, that says it was so?

At one point, US Embassy chargé d’affaires Michael Malinowski inquired with Benipayo what was up. He wrote him to say that the US firms had long been operating in RP and would not risk their reputations with a fraudulent contract of that size. More so since they were engaged all over Asia in similar voter or national ID systems. Malinowski asked for a derogatory report too, so he could sic stern US laws on the three firms if necessary - but didn’tt get any. In the end, he acknowledged that it was Comelec’s call whether or not to proceed with VRIS, but that it was the poll body’s duty too to tell the winning bidders what its decision is and why. More so since the firms already spent $2,4 million on technical analysis and work that Comelec itself had asked for.

Benipayo also cited criticisms that the ID cards - at P6.5 billion for 36 million voters – were too expensive at P185 apiece. This proved that he really didn’t know anything about the VRIS that Comelec itself had devised by way of implementing the law. It’s the system of relisting, photographing, fingerprinting, precinct assigning, central computer filing and continuing registration of new voters that would cost that much over ten years. The ID card are but an incidental portion of the work.

Recently Benipayo stated that all he wishes to implement is the other law that calls for automated counting. He claimed that it would cost only P500 million, then said oh, perhaps P1.5 billion. But he has yet to reply to computations that it would actually cost P10-P20 billion, considering that he is considering high-end P250,000-machines, at one or two in each of the 40,000 polling centers.

At the rate Benipayo is moving, even the counting machines won’t be ready for the 2004 national and local elections, much more next year’s barangay election that he now agrees to postpone till 2005. And even if he does put up the machines, he would only have sped up the counting, but not prevented the massive fraud.

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