What now, more elections with padded voters lists?

A funny thing happened on the way to the press office. Fourteen justices of the Supreme Court made a definitive decision on a long-disputed government project. In announcing it, though, the Tribunal’s public information bureau rendered its own version way beyond the magistrates’.

Last week’s ponencia by Justice Angelina Sandoval-Gutierrez was clear. The Court ruled that Photokina Marketing Corp., even if it handily had won a 1999 bidding for computerized registration of voters, couldn’t compel the Comelec to sign an implementing contract. This, because Photokina’s lowest qualifying bid of P6.5 billion was far higher than the 1997 Congress appropriation of P2.8 billion for the project.

There is something to be said about the ruling. For, Photokina never asked Comelec to sign a contract. There was none to begin with. What the consortium of Filipino, American and French biometrics and data-base experts were requesting all these years was that Comelec begin drafting a contract and negotiating time frames with them. From there, the election body can go back to Congress for the additional funding, as it did in 2000 when it got P1 billion more.

The budget is still P2.7-billion short. Congress understandably must scrimp, what with government spending perennially outstripping revenue colelctions. Besides, as all big businesses going for big contracts know there’s a big difference between drafting and signing deals. More so if with the government. In Photokina’s case, long months passed between the bidding and the winning. And many more from there to the consequent Court decision.

But that doesn’t bother Photokina anymore. What rankles the company is that the Tribunal’s press office made its own seemingly official interpretation of the ruling. It declared in a press statement that the justices had ordered Comelec to withdraw the Notice of Award issued to Photokina in September 2000. The implication was that the bidding and awarding were illegal and thus void from the start – something the justices never said.

Photokina, a distributor of PCs, digital cameras, printing equipment and x-ray films, does not wish to contest the Tribunal’s decision. Nor do its consortium partners, giants IBM, Unisys and Polaroid of the US, and Sagem of France. But they do want their reputations preserved. For they intend to do more business in RP, government badgering and court delays notwithstanding. The US firms also wouldn’t risk hints of shenanigans, which could set US authorities running after them on suspicion of corrupting a foreign government. Certainly not after they already spent $2 million n technical and feasibility studies for a measly project that’s awarded but unsigned. So they’re asking the press office to please clarify its statement that Manila newspapers had published for the record. That Notice of Award – never ordered to be rescinded – is their proof of clean hands.

There’s more than reputation behind the Notice. There’s also what experts of contract law call "reserving one’s right of first refusal". Photokina and partners won the bid fair and square based on their experience in other countries’ electoral and social-welfare systems. If you need anybody to photograph, fingerprint, issue tamper-proof ID cards to voters or design the very database of million-member mutual funds, you’d call them in. From successful – meaning, awarded, signed, uncontested – projects in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, the partners had individually or jointly helped clean up voter and welfare registries. If anybody would now go to Comelec with a copycat version, or if the poll body even thinks of doing it on its own after Photokina and partners already sunk $2 million that they’d probably never recover, they’ll certainly sue. At the very least they’d move in with a rightful claim to a project on which they already poured millions in pre-operations.

But that’s all between the Comelec and the Photokina consortium, with the Court as referree of shorts. What’s more important for 37 million voters – 44 million, if the absentee-voting bill were to pass – is who, when and how the voters’ list will finally be purged.

To begin with, no one knows for sure how we ever got to be as many as 37 million noncard-bearing, indelible ink-complaining, trucked and fed ballot sellers. Only a decade-and-a-half ago during the snap presidential election of 1986, there were but 14 million of us – and we were even suspecting that Marcos had bloated that figure to approximate his KBL’s overwhelming cheating machinery. If we doubted the voters list then, when secret balloting meant we couldn’t get to see whom the soldiers wrote in our ballot for us, more so now when an unmuzzled press is exposing flying registrants and voters by the thousands in hundreds of small towns. Add to that the possibility of worse padding of registries in case politicians see an opportunity in seven million absentee voters – they’re absent, so who’s to complain, right? – and the list would definitely be the most imaginative work of fiction by 2004.

Poll watchdogs from Makati are thrilled with the Supreme Court decision. At least, it would delay any re-enlisting of voters, the logical first step in cleansing any flawed electoral process like RP’s. That would enable them to freely push their own brand of cleanup; that is, speedy automated counting which should actually come after a registry purge. What’s the point of a quick count, if all you’re quickly counting are flying voters’ ballots?

There are murmurs that lots of money would be made from the supply of automated counting machines to the Comelec. But spreading that speculation now would only delay any cleanup of RP elections, the same way that Comelec neglect and Congress scrimping have stalled the purge of the voters’ registry.

So, what to expect of the 2004 presidential, congressional and local elections? More of the same frauds, what else?

* * *

Catch Linawin Natin, Mondays, 11:30 p.m., on IBC-13.

* * *

You can send comments to [email protected]