Comelec urged to reassess lone bidder for 2025 polls

An electoral monitoring group has urged the Commission on Elections to review the track record of the primary lone bidder in the procurement of the new automated election system or AES for the 2025 national and local elections.

Democracy Watch Philippines, one of the official observers of the ongoing procurement process for the 2025 polls, expressed in a Facebook post their worry regarding the involvement of South Korean firm Miru Systems Company Limited, highlighting the company's recent "catastrophic failures" and "questioned" projects in Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"We urge Comelec to give Miru's track record a thorough once-over as part of its due diligence, as it should with all suppliers. It might want to investigate the company's alleged links to controversies in Congo and Argentina," Democracy Watch Philippines said.

"Such concerns over hacking vulnerabilities and vote manipulation are so grave as to have prompted watchdog groups and independent experts to flag many fatal weaknesses in Miru's technology publicly," the group added.

Democracy Watch Philippines stated that it was alarmed by reports of Miru's malfunctioning technology involving 70 percent of voting stations on day one of the recent elections in Iraq, which forced authorities to revert to manual count and caused widespread chaos and wholesale erosion of public trust in the polls.

It further noted that 45.1 percent of machines provided by Miru in Congo experienced malfunction and technical issues, resulting in delayed voting and confusion among voters.

"We trust that the Comelec will raise these issues in the interest of ensuring the integrity of the 2025 elections. We cannot have counting machines failing at such a massive scale, as this would cause political instability in the country," the group said.

"Before it's too late, we appeal to the Comelec to act with utmost prudence and only consider vendors that demonstrably uphold the values of a secure, transparent, and genuinely credible Philippine election. Our very democracy is at stake. May wisdom and discernment reign in the procurement process," it added.

Comelec chairman George Erwin Garcia refused to issue a comment on the poll watchdog's statement.

During the opening of bids for the 2025 NLE AES, a joint venture led by Miru emerged as the lone bidder for the procurement project.

However, the Comelec Special Bids and Awards Committee or SBAC declared Miru ineligible due to its failure to comply with the requirements provided under the Government Procurement Reform Act.

Following the declaration of "failure of bidding," the Comelec SBAC will open the second round of bidding for the 2025 AES procurement on 4 January.

The Miru-led joint venture can still join the second round of bidding as long as the deficiencies and defects of its bidding documents are addressed, according to Comelec spokesperson John Rex Laudiangco.

The Comelec is currently looking for a system provider for the new automated election system dubbed as the Fully Automated System with Transparency Audit and Count or FASTrAC.