Holy Family wins bid to print ballots for 2013 polls, says NPO

A joint venture led by Holy Family Printing Corp. won the bid to partner with the National Printing Office for printing an estimated 54 million ballots need in the 2013 mid-term elections, the NPO said Friday.   Holy Family made a P780.7-million tender offer to lease and install printing equipment and buy paper and other materials to for printing machine-readable ballots.   The budget for the contract was pegged at around P784 million, according to state-owned NPO. According to its website, Holy Family was founded and incorporated in June 1978 as a commercial printer and. It was also accredited as a Government Security Printer.  A post-qualification evaluation by an NPO Special Technical Working Group checked all documents submitted by Holy Family. The NPO also reported a 100 percent accuracy rate for 1,000 ballots tested ballots.   Two other bidders – Smartmatic TIM Corp. and joint venture Advance-ASA-ePDS – vied for the ballot-printing contract.   During the qualification process for the bidding conducted by the NPO Bids and Award Committee (BAC) chaired by lawyer Sylvia Banda, both Smartmatic and Advance were disqualified for not meeting certain pre-qualification requirements.   Smartmatic failed to meet a prerequisite that a bidder or its partner had to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission by 2006 or earlier. Smartmatic was registered with the SEC only in 2009.    Smartmatic also failed to submit a single-largest contract of at least P196 million to show that it has adequate experience in security printing services required by the state-owned printer. The documents it submitted covered on the supply and lease contracts.   The company supplies the Precinct Count Optical Scan machines for the automated polls.   Along those lines, Advance also failed to pre-qualify for the bidding. The bidding was held last Sept. 5 and Sept. 12 with representatives from the Commission on Elections and the Commission on Audit as observers.   As mandated by Executive Order 285, signed by then President Corazon Aquino on July 25, 1987, the government’s printer is the only organization authorized to print ballots for all elections. — Gian Geronimo/VS, GMA News