Comelec taking us for a ride–Pimentel

Senator Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

SEN. AQUILINO “Koko” Pimentel III has likened the Commission on Elections’ new vote-counting machines (VCMs) to a brand-new car with the air-conditioning and stereo systems disabled.

Pimentel lamented that the VCMs that the Comelec presented have new features that would enhance the transparency of the voting process but which the Comelec will not use in the May elections.

Comelec officials demonstrated the operation of the VCMs during a joint congressional oversight committee hearing on the automated election system Tuesday in which election watchdog groups expressed apprehensions over the integrity of the machines.

Comelec chair Andres Bautista told the hearing that the poll body had decided not to print receipts for the voters, which   is provided for in the VCMs, because of time constraints, among other reasons.

Bautista also said the poll body was also inclined to disable a screen in the VCM that would allow voters to review their votes after they turned in their ballots, also because of time constraints.

“So they just made us believe in these machines but when Election Day comes, these machines are not so believable because they will disable (these features). So what’s the point?” said Pimentel, who cochaired the hearing with Rep. Oscar Rodriguez.

“We were like taken for a ride in a beautiful vehicle with air-con and stereo but these were turned off,” he said.

Pimentel noted that the government paid for these features when it leased some 96,000 VCMs from Smartmatic-Total Information Management Corp.

Former Comelec chief Sixto Brillantes abruptly left the hearing reportedly because the same old issues like the printing of receipts were being raised again by the same election watchdog organizations.

But Pimentel said that even if these issues had been raised before, these concerns were not answered by Comelec and so the poll body would see that “we have a segment of society that is persistently pushing for these changes.”

Bautista explained that the Comelec en banc had voted 7 to 0 against the printing of receipts for voters because of the time to be consumed in doing so. It would take 13 seconds to print the receipt, 15 seconds to read a print-out and then minutes more to change the paper roll in the machine.

“It will add five to seven hours to voting time and one of the challenges is the long queues (on election day),” he said.