Two companies submit bid for OMR machines

PCOS Maching. Photo from Yugatech.

MANILA – Only two companies have submitted bids for the lease of 23,000 optical mark reader (OMR) machines which will be used as supplement to the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) for the 2016 elections.

While five companies were reported to have purchased the bidding documents, only Smartmatic-TIM Corp. and Indra Sistemas have submitted their proposals.

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) confirmed acceptance of the two companies’ eligibility requirements and initial technical proposals.

Comelec-BAC is also scheduled to accept the bid proposals for direct-recording electronic (DRE), or the touch-screen system being eyed for lease, today.

Smartmatic’s eligibility, however, was questioned by Indra Sistemas adding that the company supplied infirm documents.

Meanwhile, the Comelec is eyeing a total of 410 units of DRE for the pilot testing of the technology in May 2016.

“We allocated two weeks for this. But since there are two of them, it might be cut short. It will depend on the processes they will demonstrate to us,” BAC Chair Helen Aguila-Flores said.

Following the bidding process, bidders are expected to submit their eligibility requirements and initial technical proposals and the end-to-end demonstrations of the actual voting machines from casting of votes.

Canvassing is also required until the transmission of generated election returns (ERs) to Comelec’s data servers.