EDITORIAL - Get your act together

A disagreement over who gets to control the money and operations led to the withdrawal of the Filipino-owned Total Information Management Corp. from its partnership with the Dutch-Venezuelan firm Smartmatic Corp. At least this was the story given by Commission on Elections Chairman Jose Melo to the press following a closed-door meeting between Comelec officials and executives of Smartmatic and TIM yesterday.

The rumor mill was on overdrive yesterday, with some quarters believing that the deal was deliberately sabotaged to ensure that the Comelec would be forced to conduct the 2010 elections manually. The manual option was also announced by Melo yesterday as he pointed out that there was no more time to conduct another bidding in case the Smartmatic-TIM partnership fell apart. The Comelec has given the consortium until this Friday to make its final decision.

How difficult is it to shift to automated elections? Next to impossible, it seems, given the latest setbacks. Machines can have glitches, and poll automation is no silver bullet against election cheating, which has become deeply entrenched in Philippine culture. But there is reason to hope that a new voting system and a quicker vote count will reduce opportunities for manipulating the results.

The country’s first attempt at full poll automation is expected to suffer birth pains, and every effort must be made to overcome these problems. Two enabling laws have been passed and two budgets approved for poll automation. Taxpayers wasted about P1.2 billion in the first attempt and continue to shell out millions more each year just to store nearly 2,000 counting machines that have never been used.

Filipinos have seen the way manual voting can be manipulated especially by those in power. The people are ready to try something new to clean up the voting system. Smartmatic and TIM must get their act together. If they can’t, they should be asked whether they were ever serious in their bid.