Ruling on Smartmatic case out soon

THE Commission on Elections (Comelec) will hand down this week its ruling on the petition seeking to disqualify technology provider Smartmatic Corp. from bidding for the automated election system (AES) in connection with the 2025 midterm elections.

Chairman George Erwin Garcia said on Wednesday that the draft resolution has been presented to the members of the commission to give them time to study it.

«Hopefully, before the end of this week, we will be able to release the resolution,» Garcia said.

«I have my own decision already. I studied the matter, studied the circumstances and laws applicable,» Garcia said.

The petition against Smartmatic was filed in June by former Department of Information and Communications Technology secretary Eliseo Rio, former Comelec commissioner Augusto «Gus» Lagman, Franklin Ysaac and Leonardo Odono.

The petitioners cited «serious and grave irregularities in the transmission and receipt of election returns» in the 2022 national elections, claiming that there were irregularities between the transmission logs and reception logs from the precinct level to the Comelec's transparency server.

Smartmatic won all the biddings of the Comelec since 2010, when it first bagged the election automation project.

In 2015, Smartmatic was disqualified from the P2.503 billion contract for the supply and lease of 23,000 units of precinct-based optical mark reader (OMR) counting machines for its failure to submit valid articles of incorporation and because its demo unit did not meet the requirements.

Smartmatic won a P1.04 billion deal for the 2022 synchronized elections, including the repair of vote counting machines and the supply of secure digital (SD) cards.