Whistleblower exposes another Comelec overprice

Overpriced and rigged contracts at the Commission on Election just won’t stop. A whistleblower formerly connected with the poll body is exposing the overpriced budget of P292 million for ballot packaging for the election in May 2013.

Lawyer Melchor Magdamo says the price is three to four times more than what the Comelec should allot. The work, he says, entails only the simple wrapping and boxing of ballots before delivery to the 82,000 polling centers nationwide, which will be covered by another contract.

Magdamo says the price of P1,000 per bunch, for a total of P82 million, already would be too generous. The Comelec technical specifications are only for black propylene plastic bags with its logo, polyethylene plastic strips marked with the precinct numbers, plastic straps, corner boards, security stickers, and rivets.

A more realistic price for each for the materials would be P500 apiece, for a total of P41 million. Add to this another generous P30 to P40 million for labor, Magdamo says, and the contract should cost P70 million to P80 million.

At the Comelec, however, a syndicate of nine or so suppliers controls the contract bids and awards. Comelec chairmen and commissioners come and go, but the suppliers stay. Some are siblings feigning to be competitors; others own and control various “competing” bidders.

Magdamo had exposed a similar ballot packaging scam in the 2010 barangay and youth council elections. Working at the time for Comelec chairman Jose Melo, Magdamo decried the P175 million, just for the materials alone and excluding labor, for the 76,000 polling centers. He said then that the cost should have been around P70 million.

The contract went on then as Magdamo was distracted by another exposé, that time involving ballot secrecy folders for P700 million, plus delivery of P100 million.

The folders, five per precinct, supposedly were to cover what voters were marking on the ballots as they sat side by side on classroom chairs. Each folder, made of cardboard, was quoted at more than P350 apiece, when an ordinary one could be bought in bookstores for only P12.

The supplier back then, OTC Paper Co., did not even make a bid, but only submitted an unsolicited proposal, which the Comelec readily accepted. On the pretext of rushing the project, the poll agency did not subject the proposal to a Swiss challenge, or semblance of a public bidding.

Magdamo’s exposé caused public uproar, and the Comelec cancelled the project. But the election body also rescinded the lawyer’s appointment as adviser to the chairman.

Magdamo recounts that the P175-million contract for ballot packaging in 2010 went to Noah’s Paper Mills.

A television news report mentioned Noah’s as again the leading bidder for the P292-million ballot packaging for May 2013. Three other suppliers reportedly signed up to bid: Integrated Packaging Corp., Negros PH Logistics Corp. in joint venture with Bookman Marketing, and Myron Mae Marketing.

Magdamo has written Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, co-chairman of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on the Automated Elections, about the overpriced Comelec budget. No response has yet been made public by Cayetano’s office.

Other Comelec watchers say that the ballot packaging, more so the ballot printing, could go to waste. This is because the automated balloting for 2013 has been put in jeopardy.

Smartmatic Corp., the Venezuelan firm that contracted the balloting for both the 2010 and 2013 elections, has lost its software license. Dominion Election Systems of Canada, the owner-developer of the source code that runs the balloting machines, has rescinded Smartmatic’s license after a falling off in recent elections in Mongolia and Puerto Rico.

Smartmatic has assured the Comelec that the 82,000 precinct count optical scanners that it supplied would work. The Comelec had leased the PCOS machines for P7.2 billion in 2010 and purchased them for another P1.8 billion for 2013.

Info-tech experts and academics doubt if PCOS machines accurately can read and tally votes without the all-important source code. The critics are banded under the AES (Automated Election System) Watch and the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG).

Their leaders warn that the Philippine government could be the laughing stock of the world should unlicensed Smartmatic provide the automated election system. This is because it could turn out to be one of the biggest software piracy acts of the decade.

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