Why is Comelec so secretive?

Reader James of Bataan exposes a new racket:

“This happened to our church pastor. His son was driving his motorcycle when pulled over by the Highway Patrol. They claimed that the registration was expired. The pastor rushed to his son’s aid to explain that the registration was new and good for two years. Still the cops impounded the vehicle. The next day the pastor went to the Land Transportation Office to register again. Naturally the agency refused since the present registration was still valid. The LTO provincial chief even wrote a certification to that effect. The pastor showed it to the Highway Patrol, who brushed him off, saying they don’t trust the LTO. They asked for more proof of LTO registration; the pastor complied. The two offices are separated only by a drug-testing lab, but cannot agree on basic rules. In the end, the Highway Patrol gave in, but not before taking photographs of the motorcycle on a cell phone, and charging P300 for supposed developing, with no receipt.”

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And reader Samuel Lim wants to know:

“Is it legal for barangays to collect parking fees? If so, how much and for what do Barangays Greenhills and Little Baguio in San Juan City collect from parkers near Immaculate Conception Academy and Xavier School? More than 500 cars park there Mondays to Fridays, and drivers are charged P30 for the first two hours alone.”

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After months of dawdling the Comelec finally decided. GPS (global positioning system) is the best technology to security-track in real time the 82,200 automated vote counters and special ballot boxes. Bar coding and RFID (radio frequency identification) simply won’t work. Poll monitors need to know where each counter is, from delivery, warehousing and test-run in Manila, to deployment to assigned precinct cluster, actual Election Day run, back to stockroom. Similarly, each box needs to be charted, from the National Printing Office for ballot loading, to transport to precincts for matching with counters, election use, transfer to municipal canvassing and, lastly, storage as paper trails of the electronic count. Too many loopholes bug bar coding and RFID. Counters and boxes can get stolen once deviated from designated routes. But GPS keeps track every second via see-all satellite, up to one-meter increments. It’s costlier, but can save the day for the country’s first nationwide automated polls. No more Lintang Bedols diverting boxes for burning, or Congress guards stuffing in fake ballots.

So the Comelec is now conducting a “public bidding” for the GPS supplier — in utter secrecy. The only word about it is that two bidders are participating. Perhaps that’s the reason some commissioners are confused.

Take Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal. Last week he announced that GPS would be used to track ballot boxes from the precinct count to municipal canvass. Huh, why only that phase, and what about the counters?

Worse, he depicted the work thus. Tens of thousands of Comelec volunteers will check with handheld barcode readers the arrival of the boxes at the municipalities. So where’s the vaunted GPS there?

Either the secrecy of proceedings confounded Larrazabal or someone fed him lies — someone who already has contracted a barcode instead of GPS supplier.

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Earlier this year the Comelec was as secretive with a P1.6-billion deal. It trained public attention on the touchy selection of an automation dealer. With no one looking, it awarded the cleansing of voter lists to Unison-NEC, which bid a mere P13,516.58 lower than the ceiling (99.999155% of budget). There was one other bidder, SAHI-TigerIT, that offered only P1.2 billion, or P400 million less. But it was disqualified on inconsistent, whimsical grounds.

SAHI-TigerIT complained, but the bids and award committee sat on it for weeks. In contrast, the technical working group told Unison-NEC to proceed pronto with unscientific trial runs. Ultimately the BAC trashed SAHI-TigerIT’s protest; the TWG endorsed Unison-NEC to the Comelec en banc with no critical remark. Unison-NEC got the contract on Sept. 16. Meanwhile the Comelec IT unit removed all records of the tests, as if to erase traces of rigging.

Here’s the catch. Soon afterwards the Comelec admitted it could not clean up the voters’ registries in time for the 2010 elections. It turned out that Unison-NEC’s technology, automated fingerprint identification system or AFIS, would take three years to 2013 to put in place for 50 million voters. So the Comelec imposed fingerprinting only on new registrants. Still the price stayed at P1.6 billion, in spite of Unison-SEC’s savings of P600 million from the three-year extension. And as reported earlier, three overseers of the quiet bidding recently flew to Japan, all expenses paid by Unison-NEC. The trip of acting IT department head Jeannie Flororita, data center chief Ferdie de Leon, and Maria Luisa Tolentino was hush-hush. Tolentino is the wife of Comelec executive director Jose Tolentino, who headed its technical working group in the MegaPacific scam.

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 “Half use of talent can mean half waste of it. A little talent pushed to its limits is a treasure. Great talent not nurtured becomes trash.” Shafts of Light, by Fr. Guido Arguelles, SJ, is available in cards: P100 per box of 25. To order, e-mail: [email protected]

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E-mail: [email protected]