4th in a series on GMA's 9th State of the Nation Address

MANILA - Commission on Elections chair Jose Melo has achieved what five former election chiefs have failed to do: prepare the system to automate the elections.

Barring any glitches, the country will have its first modernized elections after more than a hundred years of exercising the right of suffrage.

The automation, if successfully implemented, will be as important as the election of the 15th president of the Philippines.

Automation has been the elusive Holy Grail of the poll body. The signing of the contract this month with the winning consortium, Barbados company Smartmatic and local partner Total Information Management (TIM), has ended the long search.

Earlier, Melo’s predecessor, former Mandaluyong Mayor Benjamin Abalos, messed up the automation project.

Megapacific and Photokina mess

To be fair, Abalos was the most aggressive poll chair in pushing for automation. He took an active role in making sure automation becomes a reality, but he dipped his hand into the cookie jar. And he was almost caught with it.

Under his watch, the poll body resorted to short cuts and what appeared to be a sweetheart deal with personalities close to him to carry out the project. The Bids and Awards Committee turned a blind eye to the fact that the company that bagged the project was only incorporated 11 days before the bidding. It also conveniently overlooked the fact that the incorporators of the company, Megapacific, were people who were personally known to Abalos, raising a potential conflict of interest for him.

The Megapacific mess was a disaster waiting to happen. Related automation projects had suffered the same fate.

The Voter Registration and Identification System (VRIS) project. for one, reeked of irregularity when it was awarded to Photokina Marketing Corporation despite its bid of P6.58 billion exceeding the allowed budget of P1.2 billion. One commissioner, Luzviminda Tancangco, who was then chair of the bidding committee, was charged before the Sandiganbayan for giving unwarranted benefits to Photokina.

The National Precinct Mapping and the Certified Voters’ List Verification projects, which were also under Tancangco, were badly managed. These did not take off despite millions of pesos spent.

Fortunately for Abalos, the case on the Megapacific mess has been junked by the Ombudsman. The case against Tancangco however is still pending before the Sandiganbayan.

Damaged image

The Supreme Court junked the Megapacific automation project because of the shortcuts taken by Comelec. It was another black eye for the poll body, already reeling from perceptions that it is inept and corrupt. As if this was not enough, Abalos found himself in the center of the storm on another botched project, the $329 million NBN-ZTE broadband deal.

Abalos was forced to resign. More than electoral reform, it seemed the Comelec was more in urgent need of leadership reform.

Fresh from his stint at a commission tasked to probe human rights abuse, Melo was chosen to fix the Comelec and its damaged image. His appointment was welcomed by various sectors.

A former SC justice with a good reputation, Melo did not have a hard time soliciting the support of civil-society groups. Thus, when he announced that he was pushing ahead with automation, he had the needed backing.

Realizing that others before him had failed, Melo is making sure this time that he will not be just a footnote to history. He avoided Abalos’s mistakes and followed the law down to the last punctuation mark.

He opened the bidding process to the public and appointed Comelec law department chief Ferdinand Rafanan, who enjoys a solid reputation, to chair the Special Bids and Awards Committee.

He tapped poll watchdogs and civil society groups to participate in the bidding process as independent observers.

Like a man of the law, Melo was faithful to the procedure.

Warnings

But critics have warned that the country may be on the edge of a disaster with the decision of Comelec to implement a nationwide automation. While automation may have been conducted in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, they argued those were actually not real tests of the system since elections there were not real contests.

One group wants the Comelec to conduct open counting as a safeguard against electronic cheating while another group insists that automation be implemented only in select areas. They both warned that a massive failure of elections due to automation could lead the country into a crisis.

But Melo would not hear any of these Cassandras.

Whatever is the outcome, Melo is assured of a place in history.