CENTRAL LUZON OBSERVER

Missing P17-million National Printing Office poll equipment consisting P10.5M in 2004 polls, P6.5M in 2007 were unaccounted for.

Clean and honest elections next year is already compromised this early, despite the prospect of automated voting after the Commission on Audit (CoA) found P10.5 million worth of poll printing equipment that the National Printing Office (NPO), which is mandated to print election documents (eg. prints ballots, certificates of canvass, election returns, and statements of votes (SOVs), cannot account for.

The CoA report also noted that the NPO is having a hard time reconciling its balances of inventory worth P162.854 million and its Property Plant Equipment (PPE) accounts worth P472.82 million with the physical count conducted on these.

The CoA said the NPO’s inventory committee completed its physical counts on PPE and the agency’s inventories only last Oct. 31, 2008 but still the balances of the physical count and the balances recorded in the NPO books were not reconciled.

They are reports of fabricating election documents abounds particularly after the fraud-marred elections presidential elections in 2004.

The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) reported in 2007 that Arsenio Rasalan, a self-confessed vote-rigger, pointed to former Comelec director and election lawyer Roque Bello as being instrumental in the forgery of election documents in 2004. "In his affidavit, Rasalan said that Bello headed a complex operation to fabricate 10,000 election returns (ERs) and replace them for the ones being kept at the House of Representatives," according to the report.

Election lawyer Sixto Brillantes Jr. also observed the security of the printing of ERs and COCs has been compromised with the involvement of a private sub-contractor printer who allegedly colluded with fraudsters to produce spurious ERs and certificates of canvass (CoCs).