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Comelec wants to automate ARMM elections using PCOS

from NAMFREL Election Monitor Vol.2, No.10

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The Comelec en banc has reportedly decided to adopt the PCOS machine and the OMR technology to automate the ARMM elections. The polls tentatively scheduled for August, would involve only a small number of candidates vying for governor, vice-governor, and assemblyman posts in the five province of the autonomous region. The en banc supposedly voted 6-1 in favor of the automation using the PCOS, with only Commissioner Augusto Lagman maintaining that the ARMM elections should be automated using another technology. The
Comelec has not publicly released any resolution on this matter.

In previous months the House Committee on Suffrage, IT, civil society, Comelec Advisory Council and election monitoring organizations have called to forego the use of the PCOS technology in succeeding elections due to unresolved technical and systems issues. Proposals for the ARMM have been made for an all manual election or conduct the polls in a manual voting and/or count but automating the transmission and canvassing process for transparency and practical reasons.

Earlier, Comelec has assured the public that the correction of the defects will be discussed together with the negotiation of the contract. However, the en banc reportedly agreed last Tuesday that Smartmatic demonstrate first to the Comelec that all the defects have been corrected before the Commission negotiates the contract. This week, Systest Labs is expected to release to the Comelec its report on its assessment on the fixes to the software.
The Comelec will use some 5,000 PCOS units in the ARMM. It has already acquired some 900 units and is currently negotiating to buy an additional 4,000 machines from Smartmatic. The proposed cost to run the ARMM elections for its estimated 1.7 million voters is at Php 1.9542 billion (or Php 1,150 per voter) with the following cost components:

Php 198 million pesos for hardware (Php 130.9 million), ballot boxes (Php 17 million), election & stress test consumables and software components (Php 50.3 million)
Php 756 million for Technology-related services (no specifics)
Php 1 billion for Non-Technology related services (no specifics)
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If approved, the estimated 2011 ARMM polls expense per voter is more than three times that of the estimated cost per voter incurred in the May 2010 national elections (Php 322 per voter). Namfrel estimates that the Comelec spent Php 16.5 billion to conduct the 2010 automated elections for around 51,292,465 registered voters. (Sources: Namfrel data, SunStar, Malaya)

 
 
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