‘Comelec okayed PCOS deal to please foreigners’ A POLL watchdog group on Wednesday questioned why Commission on Elections Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. approved without bidding an “insidious midnight deal” with Smartmatic to repair and rehabilitate vote-counting machines that were used in the 2013 elections. Automated Election System (AES) Watch spokesman Nelson J. Celis said Brillantes and other commissioners were bypassing the procurement law and “obeying the Venezuelan company’s every command” to the detriment of clean, transparent and accurate elections. Contrary to Brillantes’ claim that time was short, AES Watch said the poll body had all the time to conduct a public bidding for the repair of the precinct count optical system (PCOS) machines as early as 2013, when a technical team from the Department of Science and Technology disclosed defects in some of the vote-counting units. Celis said it had become the Comelec’s habit “to schedule the procurement in the nick of time so they would always assert that there’s no more time [for a public bidding].” This, he added, would enable it to use alternative procurement methods such as direct contracting. Celis, who helped draft the election modernization law, said the technical defects of the PCOS machines had been acknowledged early on by the DOST, but the Comelec denied these technical problems existed until it was ordered by the joint congressional oversight committee on automated election systems to determine the cause of the problems. Another watchdog group, Citizens for Clean and Credible Elections (C3E), said the P300 million deal that the Comelec signed with Smartmatic-TIM was overpriced. Alain Pascua, C3E convenor said that to analyze or diagnose a PCOS machine should cost only between P200 and P400 per unit compared to the P3,000 Smartmatic is charging. “Diagnosing a computer machine like PCOS is very simple. All they have to do is to switch on the machine to identify if it is working or not,” Pascua said. “It cost us P300 million for that.” He added that since Smartmatic was the original supplier of the PCOS machines, the Comelec should not even pay a single centavo for the diagnostics. Also on Wednesday, Senator Aquilino Pimentel III raised the alarm over reports that one of the bidders for the new vote counting machines was controlled by a foreign government. Pimentel urged the Comelec to look into reports that the government of Spain is the largest shareholder of the Madrid-based Indra Sistemas, and has controlling interests in the company. Indra, a technology provider specializing in defense information systems, seeks to break into the area of election technology. It is competing with Smartmatic-TIM in the bidding to augment Comelec’s 82,000 PCOS machines for use in the 2016 elections. Pimentel said the Comelec should address the possibility of undue influence that a foreign government might wield, and question the integrity and efficiency of untested voting machines. “The Comelec should pursue these angles regarding Indra,” Pimentel said. Smartmatic’s lead consel Ruby Yusi earlier urged the House of Representatives to investigate reports that Indra failed to meet the requirements to bid for the P2 billion Comelec contract. Yusi also asked the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms to look into a corruption investigation in Spain against Indra, as well as the company’s track record in Southeast Asia. Comelec chairman Sixto Brillantes earlier said he ordered an investigation into allegations that Indra Sistemas S.A.’s links to the Spanish government has been involved in corrupt activities in Madrid. manilastandardtoday/2015/01/08/-comelec-okayed-pcos-deal-to-please-foreigners-/
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 04:18:15 +0000
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