ELECTIONS chairman George Garcia yesterday said the Commission on Elections (Comelec) is looking at resolving the disqualification cases against Smartmatic Philippines before the start of the bidding process for the 2025 automated election system (AES) project.
Garcia said in an interview: “The en banc is fully aware of the urgency of the matter since we are supposed to start with our procurement process already. We don’t want this issue to remain pending when we start the bidding.”
“We need to resolve this issue soon. We have committed that we will come up immediately with a resolution,” he also said.
Last June, a petition was filed by former poll official Augusto Lagman, former Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) secretary Eliseo Rio, retired Col. Leonardo Odoño, and former Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines president Franklin Ysaac calling for the disqualification of Smartmatic from the public bidding.
The petitioners said Smartmatic should be declared as ineligible to participate in the public bidding since the May 2022 AES was attended by “serious and material irregularities,” particularly in the transmission and reception of election results.
Smartmatic has countered by saying the petition is premature since it has yet to decide if it would participate in the bidding for the Full Automation System with Transparency Audit/Count (FASTrAC) project for the 2025 midterm elections.
In a related development, the Comelec pushed back the deadline for the submission of the bids for the P18.8 billion project by a week.
“To give ample time to all prospective bidders to review the requirements of the Comelec for this project, the procurement activities are hereby rescheduled,” said the Comelec – Special Bids and Awards Committee (SBAC) in its Supplemental/Bid Bulletin No.1.
From November 20, the deadline for the submission of bids and the opening of bids have been pushed back to November 28 at 9 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., respectively.
The pre-bid conference is set for today at 2 p.m.
