A PETITION has been filed before the Supreme Court (SC) seeking the issuance of a temporary restraining order to stop the Commission on Elections (Comelec) from proceeding with the public bidding for the supply, lease or purchase of Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) voting machines scheduled on December 4.
In a 19-page petition, former Assemblyman Homobono Adaza also asked the Court to enjoin Smartmatic Inc. from participating in any public bidding for new PCOS machines.
Adaza argued that the appropriation of billions of pesos to procure additional PCOS machines without undertaking an inventory and technical and forensic tests of the more than 80,000 PCOS machines constitute grave abuse of discretion and a violation of the provisions of the Constitution.
“Considering that many PCOS machines remain unaccounted for and considering, further, that the remaining PCOS machines are now stored in a warehouse without any configuration facilities, there is no way to determine how many are still usable or can still be repaired,” the petitioner said.
“Without making the inventory desired tests, it is absolutely a grave abuse of power for respondent Comelec to disburse billions of pesos and conduct public bidding for acquisition of voting machines, which may not be necessary and will involve wastage of billions of pesos,” he added.
Adaza added that the Comelec should exclude Smartmatic from participating in the bidding process for its “glaring” violations of election laws.
“The inclusion of respondent Smartmatic in the December 4, 2014 bidding, should be enjoined as the same constitutes grave abuse of discretion,” Adaza said.
This developed as an election watchdog group formally asked the Comelec to blacklist Smartmatic from participating in all election-related projects for misrepresentation, having claimed that it owned the automated election technology, and numerous violations of the country’s election laws.
The Citizens for Clean and Credible Elections (C3E) said Smartmatic also failed to meet several provisions in the 2010 Automated Election System Project Contract, including its failure to deliver the required services in a specified period.
C3E Spokesman and National Labor Union President Dave Diwa said that aside from these shortcomings, Smartmatic is also guilty of misinformation when it declared that Taiwan-based Jarltech International Corp. was its subsidiary in its qualification statements.
Smartmatic submitted Jarltech’s ISO-9001 certification as part of the requirements for eligibility to bid, claiming that they are a majority owner of Jarltech, while, in fact, they are merely subcontracting Jarltech for the manufacture of the PCOS machines.
It was also uncovered that Smartmatic did not own the automated election technology that it provided to the Comelec when it (Smartmatic) sued Dominion Voting Systems of Canada for failing to supply “fully functional technology…[and] timely technical support.…” It also held Dominion liable for its failure to deposit in escrow the required source code for the software, and its manufacturing design.
Diwa said the lawsuit, which Smartmatic filed in September 2012 in the Delaware chancery court, was a clear evidence and Smarmatic’s admission it did not own the automated voting technology that it provided to the Comelec, a clear misrepresentation and violation of the terms of contract and election laws.