Thursday, April 17, 2008 Scrapping of Armm poll automation recommended
THE bids and awards committee (BAC) of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Wednesday recommended the cancellation of automated elections for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (Armm).
"Instead of automating the Armm elections, we decided to prepare for the 2010 elections," said Jose Tolentino, executive director of the Comelec.
But he stressed that the recommendations of the BAC is still subject to the approval of the en banc.
"Our recommendation is to defer Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) system and prepare for 2010," added Tolentino.
At the same time, Tolentio explained that in scrapping the Armm election automation, it does not mean that the commission would not want to automate the elections.
"Let me point out that the commission wants to automate the elections but we don't want to make it right," he lamented.
He said the bidding was a failure since the lone bidder for DRE system, Smartmatic Sahl Joint Ventures, has failed to comply with the technical specifications as prescribed under the terms of reference, while for the Optical Mark Reader (OMR) there was no qualified bidder.
Another reason cited by Tolentino in recommending the scrapping of the automation of the Armm elections is the lack of time.
"We don't have time to re-bid for OMR," he said.
It would not be also fair to implement either the OMR or DRE only as this would produce half-baked results, he said.
"If we will use only the OMR or DRE, we will have a lot of human interventions and this will results in a lot of errors," declared Tolentino.
DRE is a touch screen machine where voters could cast their vote by touching the names of the candidates on the machine, while OMR is a machine that uses shaded paper ballots in voting.
The Armm election slated on August 11 was intended to be the pilot test for the automation of the electoral process. (MSN/Sunnex)
