Comelec on track for May 2019 elections, installs election management system

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Saturday denied being behind schedule for the May 2019 polls as it installed the Election Management System (EMS) into the agency’s main server in Santa Rosa, Laguna.

The EMS, according to Comelec spokesman James Jimenez, is a software vital to the automated election system (AES).

It contains the list of candidates, voter demographics and geographical information of a polling place. It then designs the ballot based on this information.

Although the official list of candidates has yet to be released, Jimenez said feeding it into the system will not take long.

The Comelec is still deliberating on appeals of candidates who are up for disqualification.

It expects to finalize the list by the second week of January, with the printing of ballots the week after.

On January 7 and 8 two other components of the AES—the Vote Counting Machines (VCM) and Consolidation/Canvassing System (CCS)—are scheduled for source code review by a US based organization.

This was the same vetting process done to the EMS to ensure no malicious code was mixed.

The Comelec also plans to purchase more VCMs due to the larger number of voters this year.

According to Jimenez, they are about 80 percent done with election preparations. —KG, GMA News