Comelec public biddings off to bumpy start

MANILA, Philippines - Public bidding for the election results transmission services in the 2016 presidential polls has been declared a failure.

In Resolution No. 1, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) said a failure of bidding for the first competitive public bidding for the provision of electronic results transmission solutions, management and services occurred because no bid proposal was submitted for the project, amounting to P558 million.

Only Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM) Corp. had expressed intention to bid by buying the bid document. However, during the pre-conference bidding the other day, the joint venture wrote BAC that it was no longer joining the bidding.

It will immediately conduct a mandatory review of the project and then proceed with the next cycle of the bidding, the BAC said.

Last week, BAC had disqualified bidders Smartmatic-TIM and Indra Sistemas S.A. from the bidding for the lease contracts for direct recording electronics (DRE) and optical mark reader (OMR) machines.

It found that the financial proposals submitted by the two bidders were “non-responsive.”

In a statement, Smartmatic-TIM president for Asia Pacific Cesar Flores said they decided to back out from the bidding because of the turn of events concerning their bids for DRE and OMR contracts.

“Unfortunately, recent developments regarding the PCOS bidding have created no small amount of uncertainty over the final number of voting machines to be used in 2016,” he said,referring to the precinct count optical scan machines.

“Not having this figure on hand, we were not in a position to come up with a reasonable proposal for the transmission project and thus have communicated to Comelec our intention not to participate in the tender.”

For any bidder to come up with a reasonable offer for the transmission project, the number of additional PCOS machines to be used by Comelec first needs to be determined, Flores said.

Smartmatic-TIM is protesting its disqualification from the bidding for the DRE and OMR projects due to having submitted a financial proposal that does not contain “certain items” in the summary. –  With Jess Diaz