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THE Commission on Election (Comelec) will go for the
partial automation of the forthcoming election in the Autonomous
Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) after selecting the companies that
will provide the technology.
Comelec Chairman Jose Melo said
Monday that they have already chosen a firm that will provide the
system for the poll automation and the contract signing will be done
next week.
“By May 5 or 6—it is already
probable that we will have the signing of contracts. By that time,
we can move on [with the poll automation],” Melo said in an
interview by ANC.
The firms chosen to provide the
technology for the ARMM poll automation was Smartmatic Sahi Joint
Venture (Smartmatic); Active Business Solutions Inc., ABS and Avante
International (Avante).
Smartmatic will provide the
technology for the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) system to be
used for the Maguindanao polls. The said firm was disqualified
earlier after failing to meet the bidding requirements.
On the other hand, ABS and Avante,
which have also both failed to meet the requirements for the Optical
Mark Reader (OMR) system in a re-bidding, will provide the said
system for the election in the rest of ARMM area.
The Comelec chairman said ABS
would handle the poll automation in the province of Shariff
Kabunsuan while Avante will take care of the election in Lanao del
Sur.
The election in Sulu and
Tawi-Tawi will still be conducted manually based on an earlier
agreement between the poll body and the Joint Congressional
Oversight Committee.
The Comelec chairman said it was
imperative that the coming ARMM Elections be automated for them to
assess the viability of computerizing the 2010 Presidential
Elections.
“We really have to have some
automation before the 2010 [Election] for us to see if we can do it.
We will choose the best system to use,” Melo quickly added.
The DRE system is a touch-screen
voting machine where names of candidates are displayed and the voter
will simply key in the name of candidate that he chooses on the
screen with his vote being automatically counted.
While the OMR is a
ballot-counting machine where the voter is given a ballot with names
of candidates pre-printed with ovals for the voters to shade the
names of the candidates that he or she chooses.
An OMR machine will then scan the
votes or the shaded ballots. The budget allocated for the ARMM
elections is P867 million with P279 million for DRE and P125 million
for the OMR.
--Anthony Vargas
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