Over DZMM, Korina Sanchez interviewed a COMELEC official indicatively knowledgeable on the latest development on the planned full automation of the 2010 elections. He has announced, at that point in time, that early as in the first round of the screening, 4 out of 7 have already been disqualified.

But more recent updates seem to indicate that so far, only 1 remains as possibly qualified to proceed to the next screening phase.

To think that there is hardly sufficient time more left, there might be good signs that COMELEC cannot deliver on its promise and as a consequence would just resort to the manual mode.

Perhaps, proceeding too slow due to a seemingly conscious regard of how the public or other watchdog groups might be monitoring the conduct of bidding process only results in the discovery of practices that would always tend to violate the criteria set by the COMELEC.

It is good on the one end, bad on the other.

This is not the time for the COMELEC to have to realize that the bidding will be attended to with all sorts of anomalies, malpractices, and circumventions. It is not as if this is the first time that this is happening in any bidding at all. It is just that COMELEC for now wants to play virgin, if it is.

What appalls audience is what the COMELEC commissioner has said – that those disqualified can in fact appeal as though the door is open for any possible remedial action. That statement might be slip of the tongue.

We certainly do not think that such failures as the non-presentation of an export license or an ISO certificate could be so remedied with the submission of the same at a much later time than when it is already so required. Otherwise, appeals might become windows of opportunity for ‘negotiations’ that should not have been necessary in the interest of fair play.

With a possible failure in bidding, how would the COMELEC be able to purchase those automation machines with reasonable time left to undertake the other stages of its screening process and technical evaluation? We cannot imagine how it happened that all 7 have anyway been pre-qualified to participate only to be crossed out on the first phase of the screening process while it only actually concerns documentary requirements and not so yet with the more special and technical aspects of the project.

This makes for an interesting reading on what is really happening in every bidding process when any agency of government has to procure equipments or machines through public bidding with at least 3 qualified bidders. When not 1 in 7 qualifies, what situation is the COMELEC in? It seems that they discovered that the companies participating are just playing middle-man for consortiums that do not factually exist and that some schemes of fraud are just being pulled in case these can do the tricks.

Whenever there is a major procurement by any government agency and in such quantities, the bidding process is always participated in by good and bad bidders, to say the least.

Some professed information in their application only to be validated as untrue such as perhaps, a factory does not exist in the stated business address or that it is not really a part of a consortium, neither is it a manufacturer, and so on. In other words, some of these may conveniently merge but then it might turn out that one actually just subcontracts from a bigger company.

There is such a thing then called as ‘octopus bidder’. This plainly means the bidders are like tentacles of just one principal company who will subcontract the project to them on a profit sharing scheme. Surely, there are a host of other ‘themes’ that always tend to occur. From where I sit, consistency that is moral, legal, and technical is the order of business.

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