Only Smartmatic bought bid documents for new voting machines

Only technology provider Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM) Corp. so far has shown interest in bidding to supply more than 70,000 voting machines for the May 2016 elections.

During the pre-bid conference held by the Comelec Special Bids and Awards Committee on Tuesday, Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said that only Smartmatic so far had bought bid documents for the P7.8-billion lease contract for voting machines.

But Jimenez said that this was not a guarantee that Smartmatic would actually submit its bid for the 70,977 Optical Mark Reader (OMR) machines. The pre-bid conference allows prequalified bidders a chance to raise questions and issues regarding the project and bidding process and to access bidding forms.

The poll official also said that other prospective bidders could still purchase bid documents until June 29 for a non-refundable fee of P75,000.

Jimenez said it was not always the case that those who attended a pre-bid conference went on to submit a bid.

It will be recalled that Smartmatic-TIM earlier bid for the lease of 23,000 machines to complement the counting machines used in previous elections. However, the company was disqualified during the post-qualification evaluation stage, prompting the awards committee to conduct a second public bidding.

Smartmatic filed a protest and appealed its disqualification before the Comelec en banc.

For this recent bidding for new OMR machines, the submission of bids has been set for June 29 at 9 a.m. The opening of bids will be held an hour later.

A lawyer called on the new leadership of the Comelec Tuesday to shun the services being offered by Smartmatic, the company that provided the automated system in the 2010 and 2013 elections.

Former Biliran Rep. Glenn Chong, a convenor of the poll watchdog Citizens for Clean and Credible Elections (C3E), said the Comelec should not grant Smartmatic’s appeal of its disqualification from bidding for the supply of additional counting machines for the 2016 polls.–Tina G. Santos and Jerome Aning