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E-mailThe printing of ballots for the country’s first automated elections in May is going slow, reported the Inquirer on Wednesday.
An average of 793,430 ballots have to be printed out every day for the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to produce the needed 50 million ballots by the April 25 deadline. According to Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal, however, only around 650,000 are being churned out daily.
Esmeralda Amora-Ladra, head of the poll body’s printing committee, emphasized the urgency of the situation in a memorandum which read, “Granting that 7,878,480…are all good ballots, we still have to print a total of 42,845,254 for a period of 54 days. This means, we should be able to have a daily production of 793,430,629, more or less, per day from four printers, which is impossible!”
She added that the slow printing was due to the four printing machines at the National Printing Office (NPO) not operating at maximum efficiency.
“We are getting a fifth printer to increase the printing output and have all ballots ready for shipment by April 25,” Larrazabal said. “We are also considering a sixth printer to augment the current capacity.”
“If we have printed the ballots too close to the April (25) deadline, we could ship them by air instead of land to speedup deployment,” he added.
Ballot boxes delivered
Comelec also announced on Wednesday that the first batch of the 77,000 new ballot boxes ordered by Comelec have already arrived from Taiwan.
“We have now 5,000 [ballot boxes] and we expect 5,600 ballot boxes to arrive also tomorrow [Thursday]. We’ll have the ballot boxes arriving every so often,” Larrazabal said.
The ballot boxes were manufactured by Smartmatic Corporation, which, together with the local company Total Information Management (TIM), constructed the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines which will be used in the May elections.
“This is a purchase, not a lease. After the elections, we get to use the ballot boxes as storage for the ballots and for other uses in coming elections,” Larrazabal added.
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