Comelec’s vow to fix fiasco baseless By Marie A. Surbano 05/06/2010

Smartmatic, poll body say voting still on schedule Comelec’s vow to fix fiasco baseless By Marie A. Surbano 05/06/2010 Election officials insisted yesterday that next week’s polls would go ahead, amid frantic efforts to replace more than 70,000 faulty memory cards that were to be used in vote counting machines. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has come under enormous pressure since revealing the technical glitch. But poll commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal said Monday’s election, when 50 million people are eligible to choose a new president and thousands of other government positions, would go ahead as planned, even as the Smartmatic consortium admitted that it will still be testing the machines with the newly reconfigured CFC cards on election day itself. “Going manual is not an option,” Larrazabal said during a news briefing after the memory cards for the more than 82,000 precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines malfunctioned during the sealing and testing early this week. But most IT experts were wary over the poll body’s vow to go on with automated polls as scheduled, saying that the assurances given by Smartmatic officials that they can solve the fiasco in the failed final testing and sealing (FTS) of PCOS machines in Metro Manila and provinces are empty if not entirely baseless.... MORE   Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20100506hed1.html

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