Video
by Ed Lingao
Barbados-registered Smartmatic International and local counterpart Total Information Management Corporation (TIM) have yet to tie down many loose ends in their winning bid to automate the 2010 elections. Chief among the concerns are security issues now being raised by computer experts, nongovernmental groups, and even members of the Commission on Elections Advisory Council (CAC) that […]
by Ed Lingao
THEIR PLANNED joint venture now hangs by a thin thread, but squabbling partners Barbados-registered Smartmatic International and local counterpart Total Information Management Corporation (TIM) have also yet to tie down many loose ends in their winning bid to automate the 2010 elections.
Chief among the concerns are security issues now being raised by computer experts, nongovernmental groups, and even members of the Commission on Elections Advisory Council (CAC) that oversaw the protracted, if transparent, bidding process. These unresolved security issues have raised the specter of an automated exercise where the cheating will not just be as fast as the counting, but harder to detect as well.
Sidebar
by Jaemark Tordecilla
FOR THE younger generation steeped in the real-time world of text messaging and Twitter, the idea of having to wait several weeks for election results is downright silly. Yet even the youth may have a hard time taking in the P7.2-billion price tag of the Commission on Elections’ new poll automation system.
Some may argue that it’s still a small price to pay in exchange for a long-awaited break from a tradition of election-related controversy. A perennially cash-strapped country, however, will never go wrong in scrutinizing every bill a supplier hands over to it.
Good-bye automated elections?
by Malou Mangahas and Ed Lingao
THE COURT and not the boardroom looks like the next destination of the two proponents of the yet unborn joint venture project that was supposed to give the Philippines its first national automated elections in May 2010.
The parties call their differences “irreconcilable,” and by the letter of the existing Joint Venture Agreement (JVA), the conflict may be resolved only through tedious and costly arbitration in Singapore, under the commercial arbitration rules of the Singapore Chamber of Commerce.
