Page 33 - kpi20482

32 ENHANCING ELECTIONS AS INSTRUMENTS OF DEMOCRACY IN THE ASEAN REGION

Pacific, who won the bid to supply the machines. According to the SC,
the machines of Mega Pacific failed to conform to the minimum system

capabilities set forth in R. A. No. 8426, and the Court noted the highly
irregular and questionable conduct of the bidding process, which seemed
to favor Mega Pacific over other suppliers.

On January 23, 2007, Congress passed Republic Act No. 9369 as
an amendment to R. A. No. 8436, which authorized anew the COMELEC

to implement an AES. In August 2008, the COMELEC managed to
automate the regional polls in the ARMM, using direct-recording-electronic

(DRE) technology in the province of Maguindanao, and the optical mark

reader/recording (OMR) system in the rest of the ARMM. Informed by the
ARMM experience, the COMELEC then decided to utilize the paper-based

PCOS system the requires voters to fill out paper ballots that will be fed
into a machine scanner that counts the votes.

Through R. A. No. 9525, which was passed on March 23, 2009,

Congress appropriated Ph Peso 11,301,790,000 for the automation of the
May 2010 national and local elections, and in July 2009, the COMELEC

and SMARTMATIC-TIM entered into a contract for the provision of an AES
for the May 2010 elections, which saw the automation of the counting,
transmission, and canvassing of votes, with systems integration and overall

project management in place. The Paper-Based AES has three components,
namely, an Election Management System (EMS), a PCOS System and a CCS.

The 2nd and 3rd components provide for the electronic transmission of
election results using a Public Telecommunications Network, and Overall
Project Management. The COMELEC formed a Project Management Office

as the implementing unit of the AES. The AES has been in place since
then and was used in the subsequent 2013 mid-term elections and the

most recent presidential elections of 2016.