Under two laws passed in 1996 and 1997, Comelec should have modernized in time for last May’s congressional and local elections. RA 8189 called for a central file of voters’ registration records under a National Computerized Voters’ List. Too, a voter identification system using tamper-proof ID cards. RA 8436 called for the automation of vote counting.
The aims of the two laws are clear. Comelec has to purge the voters’ registry of dead and multiple registrants to clip the wings of flying voters. After which, it has to permanently keep cheating voters out of the registry while accommodating new registrants who come of voting age or change address. In the end, Comelec has to speed up the tedious manual counting of ballots and canvassing of election returns, while convincing perennially complaining candidates of the purity of the system.
Benipayo says the first step – creating a central file of voters – has been finished. This, Comelec did by simply adopting the 1998 registry, a list that political parties suspect is padded. Benipayo admits he has yet to move onto the more contentious work of setting up the ID system and automating the count. Contentious, because this is where the commissioners are split into two camps, one composed of Benipayo and two new appointees, the other composed of four earlier ones. Their fight is about methods, although both sides insinuate more than that.
Under Benipayo’s predecessor Harriet Demetriou, Comelec had assigned Commissioner Luzviminda Tancangco to oversee the entire modernization. Tancangco approached her work by hiring thousands of casuals to verify the existence of voters in the 1998 registry. She also remapped numerous provincial precincts that clustered voters alphabetically instead of by streets. All this, preparatory to awarding a private contract to relist all voters, this time with fingerprints and photographs in tamper-proof IDs. Tancangco was halfway through the verification and remapping when Benipayo took over the chairmanship.
For Benipayo, Tancangco’s work was a waste of time and hundreds of millions of pesos. After all, RA 8189 forbids the reassignment of precincts without the voter’s written consent. He asked the commissioners to stop the verification and remapping a month before last May’s election. They acceeded. Tancangco warned them, though, not to blame her for the recurrence of age-old complaints on Election Day about missing names and precincts.
Also by the time Benipayo took over, Comelec had already bid out and declared the winner of the voter registration and ID system in Sept. 2000. Backed by international firms Polaroid and Unisys, Photokina had won with a bid of P6.1 billion, later raised to P6.5 billion when Comelec threw in several revisions and rush jobs. Under Comelec requirements, the winner was to fingerprint and photograph old and new voters from 2001 to 2004, in time for the next presidential, congressional and local elections. The files would be computerized, and a special software would match and ferret out incorrigible multiple registrants for prosecution. Photokina would then issue ID cards that voters would use on Election Day 2004 and every balloting thereafter.
Comelec managers were negotiating the final terms and conditions of the Photokina contract when Demetriou wavered. She fired off a memo saying she couldn’t sign the P6.5-billion awarded bid. This, because the 2001 budget for modernization was only all of P2.1 billion. No problem, the commissioners said, Congress had committed to appropriate the balance every year until 2004. Demetriou still balked. The commissioners and managers were still arguing about the contract when Benipayo and two new appointees took over. They took Demetriou’s position.
Benipayo holds the view that signing the P6.5-billion deal would be illegal because it is overbudget. Other commissioners believe otherwise, saying they can release only what has been appropriated for the year because the Photokina contract calls for progress payments anyway. When Benipayo stood his ground, the commissioners then said he should ask Congress for the P6.5-billion budget in 2002. Benipayo did no such thing. In fact, congressmen who scrutinized the 2002 budget proposal last Oct. wondered why Comelec did not even ask for a budget for the scheduled barangay elections. Photokina was so dismayed with Benipayo’s line that it sued the Comelec for noncompliance with an award for which its foreign partners already have spent $2.4 million for technical studies. Benipayo says: "The technology behind the (Photokina) proposal is sound, and I have never said otherwise. It is the appropriateness of the package to the Philippine setting that is in question."
Cost, to this day, is what’s holding Benipayo back from proceeding quickly to modernize. Cost is also what’s shocking the commissioners as they discover how much full automation of all polling center wills cost: P20 billion on top of the P6.5-billion ID system. Sen. Edgardo Angara, chairman of the committee on electoral reforms, does not want to quibble over costs. For him, democracy is more costly than authoritarian rule. But since Filipinos opt for democracy, the core of which are clean and orderly elections, then they must be foot the heavy bill for it.
Benipayo believes otherwise. In the meantime, he is waiting for Congress to give Comelec the bigger amount to modernize.