MANILA, Philippines—To prevent cheating and disenfranchisement in next year’s planned automated elections, each of the 80,000 machines to be used should have a 99.995 percent accuracy rate, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Monday.

The Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine to be used in the balloting will be tested this week, according to Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez.

The accuracy requirement of 99.995 percent means a threshold of “one error out of 20,000 markings,” Jimenez said. If it falsely reads two or more ballot markings, the machine will be rejected, he said.

Jimenez said the accuracy rate was based on the number of ballots that would be fed into the voting and counting machine. Each PCOS equipment is expected to process about 1,000 ballots with 35,000 markings, he said.

High standards

Ferdinand Rafanan, procurement committee chair, said the Comelec’s technical working group, information technology experts and scientists from the Department of Science and Technology would test the machine of the company with the lowest calculated bid.

“Our standards are very high,” he said.

The Special Bids and Awards Committee (SBAC) is to check the equipment on Wednesday. Only the company with the lowest calculated quote will demonstrate the capabilities of its machine, Rafanan said.

So far, two companies have hurdled the eligibility and technical screenings conducted by the SBAC the past two weeks.

The consortium of Smartmatic International and Total Information Management Corp., and the joint venture between Indra Sistemas, Strategic Alliance Holdings Inc. and Hart Intercivic were left standing from the original seven bidders.

Evaluation of proposals

On Saturday night, the SBAC opened the financial bids of the two bidders. According to Rafanan, Smartmatic’s bid was P7.19 billion, while Indra’s was P11.2 billion.

Although the financial bids have been disclosed, Rafanan said the SBAC could not announce the winner because the committee still had to complete the evaluation of the financial proposals.

Monday night, the SBAC disqualified Spain-based Indra Sistemas after it failed to comply with the financial proposal, leaving the Smartmatic consortium the lone company qualified to bid.

In its bid document, Indra said it could only supply about 50,000 PCOS, significantly lower than the 82,000 machines required by the Comelec.

Indra could still appeal the SBAC decision. As of Monday night, however, it had not indicated that it would do so.

Links to politicians

Rafanan reiterated that the companies and their partners would be scrutinized during the post-qualification process to ensure that there were no incumbent politicians holding positions in their firms.

The consortium will also be disqualified if one of its incorporators or major stockholder is a relative, up to fourth degree of consanguinity, of an elected official.

“That’s a new Comelec requirement to make sure that those involved with the poll automation have no connections with politicians,” Rafanan stressed.

He said the companies who entered the bidding had declared that they were not related to politicians or had one on their payroll.

Some election watchdog groups and legislators have warned that a partisan company could perpetuate large-scale computerized cheating in the May 10, 2010 polls.