Comelec eyes purchasing 100,000 new PCOS machines

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) is looking into buying 100,000 new vote-counting machines for the 2016 elections, newly appointed poll chairman Andres Bautista said Tuesday.

In a press conference, Bautista said the purchase of 100,000 new Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines is one of the “two tracks” they are considering for next year's elections, the other being the refurbishing and upgrade of the existing PCOS machines.

“We are going to go through two tracks that require both public bidding,” he said. “One track is we will bid out for the refurbishing, upgrade the existing PCOS  machines. The other track we are looking at is purchasing about 100,000 new machines.”

Bautista said parallel biddings will be conducted for the two options.
 
“Because of time constraints, we don’t want to lose options as we go nearer the presidential elections so we would like to pursue this in parallel. This is a time-bomb exercise. May 9, you can’t change that so we need to make a decision at some point,” he said.

Two options
 
The first option, which has an estimated budget of between P5 billion to P5.5 billion, involves the refurbishment of the PCOS machines used in previous elections. These will be supplemented by 23,000 new Optical Mark Reader (OMR) voting units that will be leased by the Comelec.
 
The second option, meanwhile, will involve the acquisition of new machines, together with the 23,000 OMR machines that have been already bidded out by the Bids and Awards Committee (BAC). The poll body would need P12 billion to P13 billion for this.
 
Comelec Commissioner Christian Lim said they have enough funds from their savings, which is at P14.5 billion.
 
Bautista noted that they are inclined to hold consultations with other stakeholders to get their opinion.
 
“We will be consulting with the other stakeholders, who are pushing for clean, honest and credible elections. Having said that, we all know that May 9, 2016, is an immovable date so there is something that we have to work on towards to pass our papers,” he said. —KBK, GMA News