Half-baked automation: Recipe for poll disaster?

THE FIRST NO-EL?: Is the Commission on Elections helping, perhaps unwittingly, to lay the basis for NoEl (No Election), or at least to set the stage for a failure of election in 2004?

The Comelec has confessed its inability, mainly for lack of funds, to carry out the mandate for it to manage starting in 2004 the absentee voting by millions of eligible Filipinos residing abroad.

On top of that, the Comelec appears bent on awarding the P1.3-billion contract for the automation of the counting and canvassing of votes in 2004 to a firm that is allegedly neither experienced nor equipped for it.

The mass denial of the right of suffrage of overseas Filipinos numbering some five million plus the likely confusion in the counting/canvassing using what appears to be an inadequate computerized system spell disaster.

Court suits questioning the award of the automation contract will delay preparations. Even assuming the elections are held as scheduled in May 2004, confusion in the computerized reporting of the vote may result in a failure of election in a worst scenario.

One logical effect of such a failure is the holdover of incumbent elective officials, including President Arroyo, until the next elections.

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KOREAN, U.S. TEAMS: Registered voters last year numbered almost 37 million spread over 246,132 poll precincts in 41,945 barangays all over the archipelago. An estimated 87 percent of registered voters came out to vote in the 1998 elections.

Comelec insiders report that the automation contract had been awarded "in principle" to the "MegaPacific" team with Korean partners, but that the signing of the contract has been held in abeyance.

The other serious contender was identified as the "Total Information Management" (TIM) team. MegaPacific offered a Korean core technology and the latter an American one.

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QUALIFYING BIDDERS: Insiders said that the equipment proposed by MegaPacific has never been used in a public election involving more than 20 million voters. This is contrary to the bid requirement that "the counting machines should have been used in at least one political exercise with no less than 20 million voters."

Also, the rules provide that "the primary technology proponent . . . should show documentary evidence that their services have been contracted for at least one political exercise with at least 20 million votes . . ." MegaPacific is basically a long-standing supplier for Comelec of printed forms and the like.

Insiders said that MegaPacific or its primary technology proponent, SK, had not submitted evidence that it has the required experience and that its equipment had been used in an election involving at least 20 million voters.

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BUMPY TESTS: The equipment submitted by MegaPacific for testing by the Department of Science and Technology was not the same machine submitted in the bid, according to insiders.

Under accepted standards for qualification testing, prototypes or substitutes are never allowed for testing. The rules also require that the software to be used be certified by an independent testing authority and must be the same software used during the test.

Insiders said the MegaPacific machine submitted for testing conked out three times during the "harsh" condition test. The six Koreans representing the bidder who were watching the tests had to fix the equipment every time it failed.

They reported inconsistent per-formance of the machine when reading marginal marks. The same ballot was fed five times, with five different results. Sometimes the same marginal mark was read, but sometimes it was not. Sometimes the ballot just went through without registering any reading.

MegaPacific reportedly claimed it has a better, faster machine, but this was not submitted for testing at the time. But the claim apparently was given credence.

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STAND-ALONE SYSTEM: Rep. Act 8436, which is the basis of the program to automate, provides that the system has stand-alone machines that can count votes and an automated system which can consolidate the results immediately

The reason for this is to isolate the machine and prevent its being fed extraneous or manipulated data or its being used for something else.

The MegaPacific system is driven by a personal computer. The ballot OCR (optical character reader) device is driven by a PC, the consolidation system by the same PC, as is the printer and other peripherals. This system is susceptible to tampering.

Rep. Act 8436 provides for an automatic ballot feeder. MegaPacific’s equipment is automatic, but TIM’s device is hand-fed the ballot one at a time. Yet, TIM’s equipment was accepted for testing.

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NO EXPERIMENTS: One problem pointed out by insiders is that the technical rules, especially for testing, are not very clear, and that they do not jibe with the provisions of the law (Rep. Act 8436).

One wonders how the Comelec can supervise the 2004 elections and produce credible results if the preparatory stages for the exercise, including the procurement of the needed equipment, are shrouded in questions.

The Comelec should listen to its own Chairman, Ben Abalos, who said that the poll body cannot afford to dabble in experiments. He also said, "Comelec cannot risk a revolution because of a wrong choice of partner for its automation projects."

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SARS SCARE: Vice President Rollie Estabillo of Philippine Airlines told us yesterday that like other airlines, PAL is incurring revenue losses resulting from the SARS scare.

While footloose Filipinos leery of SARS may prefer to travel locally instead of to their usual haunts abroad, the airline‚s local revenue gains are eaten up by the losses in the international routes.

Estabillo also said that the South Korea-bound flight (PR416) that returned to Manila last Thursday night, after one of the passengers ran a high fever, finally departed the next morning after doctors from the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) and the Department of Health (DoH) cleared all the passengers and crew of the SARS virus.

Clearance was given to all 145 passengers shortly before midnight. They were earlier quarantined and thoroughly checked by DoH doctors at Gate 16 (an isolated gate) of the NAIA’s Terminal 1.

The sick passenger was taken to RITM where he told doctors of a bone fracture due to a recent accident that was the most likely cause of his fever.

The PAL pilot decided to turn back the B737-400 aircraft 30 minutes after takeoff to avoid possible prolonged exposure of the other passengers to a suspected SARS carrier.

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