Losers warn Comelec of Smartmatic flaws

They must know something it doesn’t. That’s why four flunked poll-automation bidders are warning the Comelec to look into the credentials of its sole qualifier, Smartmatic-TIM. All four say the consortium doesn’t meet Comelec rules on company and product capacity, and so must be debarred too. One of them adds that Smartmatic-TIM does not comply with the law on 60:40 Filipino majority in partnerships with foreign investors.

If they’re proven right, there’ll be no supplier of 82,200 precinct count optical scanners for which Comelec has budgeted P11.3 billion. Not even Smartmatic-TIM’s low bid of P7.2 billion won’t cover for its deficiencies. A special bids and awards committee is to finish post-qualification review of the consortium’s papers tomorrow.

Five-year-old Smartmatic International Corp. is a Venezuelan-owned firm based in Barbados claiming to be Dutch. Filipino partner Total Information Management was a loser in the Comelec’s failed automation of 2003. Three American bidders — Sequoia Voting Systems, Election Systems & Software, and Avante International Technology — lead the charge against the duo.

Sequoia says Smartmatic’s submissions contradict each other. In a manifestation to the Comelec on May 25, it points to Smartmatic’s claim of ongoing and recent contracts totaling $350 million. The sum does not match Smartmatic’s audited income for 2007 and 2008, which add up to less than $100 million. Thus, it fails the rule of having previously contracted one to three projects amounting to half of the Comelec’s budget, or roughly $112 million.

Smartmatic’s “proof” of compliance with the rule is spotty, according to Sequoia. It had submitted a “largest contract,” with Venezuela’s election commission, but with the contractor’s full name blacked out. The address (Bridgetown, Barbados) and incorporation date (22 Apr. 2008) are visible, though. From these Sequoia deduces that the real contractor is one-year-old sister company Smartmatic Deployment Corp. Although the SBAC counts the experience of a parent firm toward the experience of a subsidiary and vice versa, it’s unclear if the leeway applies among subsidiaries. Even if it does, Sequoia says, Smartmatic should have admitted that an affiliate is the true vendor, instead of passing itself off as such. The questioned project is for a Venezuelan election in Feb. 2009, which was not among Smartmatic’s listed works as of the Comelec cut-off date of Dec. 2008.

ES&S for its part assails the weakness of Smartmatic vote counters. The battery cable of one of five test-run machines smoked up and burned Thursday. Occurring on the seventh hour of a 12-hour test of battery life, it should’ve been enough to ditch Smartmatic. Comelec technicians, however, bought the Smartmatic line of mistakenly bringing too thin a wire linking the battery pack to the machine, thus the overheating. The battery pack and cable are integral parts of the ballot scanners, so the undersized wire shows substandard trait. Since the SBAC affirmed the Comelec electrician (whose credentials were not disclosed), ES&S withdrew from the bidding Saturday. The US’ top election machine maker says it has “lost confidence in the integrity of the process.”

Sequoia adds that the status of the ballot scanner with the burnt battery wire was never verified. Smartmatic only claimed that the machine detected the overheating and therefore shut down itself. In the confusion, no one bothered to check if the machine was able to restart.

Avante says Smartmatic misrepresented the mass production and patent of its machines. It if bags the Comelec deal, Smartmatic had told the SBAC, its 10 percent-owned Taiwanese firm Jarltech International would fabricate the 82,200 units. But Avante says Jarltech will in turn job out the work to fellow-Taiwanese Kenmec Mechanical Engineering Co. Ltd. This violates the Comelec rule against subcontracting. Smartmatic further had said the manufacturing license would come from its Canadian firm called Dominion. US press reports link Dominion’s owners to Smartmatic’s rival Sequoia, however.

F.F. Cruz and Co. says Smartmatic-TIM does not comply with the law on 60-percent Filipino-majority ownership. Computing from balance sheets TIM’s net financial contracting capacity, it appears that it owns only less than 20 percent of the joint venture. F.F. Cruz wants the Central Bank to trace how much of the bank credit line came from Smartmatic.

Election lawyer Romy Macalintal also points out a Comelec bidding lapse. It didn’t take into account the law that allows candidate substitution up to two days before Election Day. The SBAC should have designed the official ballot to include blank lines on which voters can write a substitute candidate’s name, he says. One of the 26 test-run criteria should thus have been the ability of machines to detect handwritings and so have the ballot counted manually.

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Would it be too much to ask Lakas-Kampi to dedicate its merger to the welfare of the poor? Like, it could lead the passage during this last session week of the Carper, or Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program-Extended and Reformed. This five-year extension, with a budget of P147 billion, would transfer land ownership of 1.3 million hectares of farmland to 4.3 million landless tillers. It would also fund the payment once and for all of medium-size landowners who had long surrendered excess acreage to the state.

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