Comelec urged to relax PCOS refurbishment procedures

CABUYAO, Philippines – Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III yesterday advised the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to open the refurbishment procedures being conducted on the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines to Filipino information technology (IT) experts.

In an interview after a walk-through at the Comelec warehouse containing the PCOS machines here in Laguna province, Pimentel said the poll body should allow experts to adequately assess the procedures.

“I’m not a techie person. I’m thankful that we are doing this so we can see the overall procedures. But you need some technical people to understand what is happening in detail,” said Pimentel, chairman of the joint congressional oversight committee on automated elections.

Pimentel called on the poll body to “relax its rules so that technical people will be allowed to witness what I witnessed.”

He said this will promote transparency in the country’s election system.

For his part, Comelec acting Chairman Christian Lim said they are open to the recommendations of Pimentel.

“We support the call of the senator for greater transparency. We will, of course, accommodate if there are any other requests. No problem with that,” Lim said.

During the walk through, Comelec spokesman James Jimenez explained the preventive maintenance, diagnostics and repair procedures being done by Smartmatic technical people on each of the 82,000 PCOS machines since Wednesday.

Among those being checked are the PCOS machines’ memory, clock, compact flash, power, EE Prom, scanner, thermal printer, MTD modem port, LCD screen and battery port.