Take automation budget back to drawing board - Gordon

Independent Senator Richard J. Gordon today asked the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to go back to the drawing board and reconfigure its proposed budget for the full automation of the May 2010 national and local elections.

Suspicious of sinister efforts by some quarters to thwart the full election automation in 2010, Gordon said the Comelec should reconcile glaring discrepancy with its original and revised budget proposals it has submitted to the budget department and Congress.

"There seems to be an attempt by certain unscrupulous people in Comelec to prevent the automation of elections by making it appear as not feasible," he said, adding that it was ridiculous, to say the least, of the Comelec to submit five different budget proposals.

It may be recalled that the Comelec has earlier announced it has readied five different budget proposals for the full election automation, the highest of which amounts to P61 billion and the lowest totals 3.4 billion.

However, at the recent hearing of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on Automated Election System at the Senate, Gordon was surprised that the Comelec has presented a P 9.7-billion budget for the automated election which heavily relies on the use of Optical Mark Reader (OMR) voting machines in 85 percent of the country's precincts and 15 percent of the precincts would have Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) or touch screen voting machines.

According to Gordon, the use of mostly OMR voting machines would not satisfy the objectives of fast, clean elections. He added that he prefers DRE over OMR because the latter is more susceptible to cheating compared to DRE machines. The DRE machines would be in Metro Manila, Metro Cebu and Metro Davao.

DRE machines allow voting through a touch-screen or touch-pad, while OMR machines require voters to fill up a paper ballot which is then counted with a specially designed machine.

"Comelec itself has said that OMR is prone to tampering and is much slower than DRE. Going heavy on OMR in 2010 will defeat our objective of having fast and clean elections," he said.

"Every step of the way we have to coax the Comelec to stay the course and not be afraid of the cost, because it is up to Congress really to produce the money. That is why they have to come back and come up with the real budget for a fast and very accurate system which cannot be tampered with," he added.