The Comelec Special Bids and Awards Committee (SBAC) is nearly finished with the testing of the PCOS and CCS computers from Smartmatic/TIM, the only company that has pre-qualified according to the Comelec Terms of Reference (ToR/RfP) for the 2010 Automated Election System (AES) Project. After being disqualified Avante-AMA has filed for reconsideration of their bid, so their case will be studied by SBAC this week. In the news reports, the disqualified bidders are claiming that Smartmatic's bid of PHP7.2 billion is "ridiculously low".

I claim that Smartmatic's bid is just right. The Comelec's ceiling of PHP11.4 billion, is based on previous bids for the 2008 ARMM elections, which Comelec assumes is reasonable, but which, in my personal opinion, was computed by the bidders with extreme bias in order to give them humongously generous margin of profit. In the original Comelec presentation to the Senate, which eventually approved the Comelec budget, the amount of PHP150,000.00 is budgeted per PCOS counting machine. Now the PCOS counting machine basically includes a CPU box with memory, hard disk, touchscreen, scanner, and printer. If you go to PCCORNER or PCEXPRESS on Gilmore Avenue, Quezon City, and assemble a machine like that, it will cost you less than PHP30,000.00, so PHP150,000.00 is an obviously overpriced figure.

For two days on May 27 and 28, I was an observer at the SBAC proceedings to test the Smartmatic PCOS and CCS computers. Smartmatic is offering the SAES-1800 precinct counting machine, and the only details that Smartmatic has provided is the machine's compliance with the Comelec ToR/RfP, as can be seen in the following document:

http://www.smartmatic.com/fileadmin/users/docs/SAES/SAES1800_technicalsheet_v2.0.pdf

I wish, in addition to the requirements in the ToR/RfP, that Comelec has also required all vendors, the full disclosure of the technical specifications of their PCOS counting machine. For example, the amount of memory and disk space (how many GB ram and how many GB hard disk?) would answer the question, can the PCOS machine store 1000 ballot images, and for how long will these images be stored? The resolution of the optical scanner in dots-per-inch and how many shades of Red-Green-Blue will tell how good the scanner is at reading our choices of candidates on the ballot. The power consumption of the entire unit, together with the mAhr rating of the battery will tell how long the unit can run on batteries. And so on. Many of the items on the 26-item Comelec testing list would have been unnecessary had there been full disclosure of the technical specifications. Also full disclosure of the technical specifications of the Intel PC hardware will not violate the IPR of the bidder nor will this constitute revelation of their "trade secret", because Intel PC specifications are known industry-wide and is no bidder's trade secret.

If you take a look at the exterior of the Smartmatic PCOS machine, you discover that it consists of a computer with 16-bit gray-scanner, quarter VGA touch screen, thermal paper tape printer, connectors for UTP network cable and modem, and a Compact-Flash slot. The Smartmatic website says that it runs embedded uClinux, and so the operating system and election program are burned into ROM. All of these components are integrated into one housing. Since Smartmatic saved a lot of money in putting everything into one housing, and in using uClinux, a free open source operating system, and since Comelec will need more than 82,000 of these PCOS machines, Smartmatic will save a lot of money, because of the huge volume of the Comelec order. It is not inconceivable if we guess the cost of ordering such units from China through Taiwan is about PHP15,000.00 to PHP20,000.00 per unit. This is not a bad estimate, since this is the cost today of netbooks, which are better endowed than the Smartmatic PCOS machine.

Of course, this does not include the cost of program development of the election programs, the cost of transporting the equipment to the precincts, the cost of training Comelec people on the use of these machines, and the cost cellular modems and of the telecommunications infrastructure that will needed to transmit the election returns from the precincts to the canvassing centers.

But PHP20,000.00 per unit times 82,000 units that will be needed is only
PHP1.64 billion, leaving Smartmatic with money to spend on its other costs, with some profit to spare.

So, it is not true that Smartmatic's bid of PHP7.2 billion is "ridiculously low".

In my next article, I will explain why open source operating system and application programs is the best choice for Philippine Elections 2010.

I tried copying the contents of my Multiply blog onto this page, two times, but for some reason, Yahoo refuses to allow pasting content here. Is this a blog.360.yahoo.com bug? So here is the link instead:

http://pmana.multiply.com/journal/item/48/Martins_Lupang_Hinirang_May_05_09