The Commission on Elections will have a surplus of 6,739 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines for the May 10, 2010 polls after reconfiguring 329,389 established precincts to only 75,471 clusters, easing the pressure on the poll body in the conduct of the country’s first nationwide fully automated elections.

This as the Smartmatic-TIM Corporation, the consortium that won the bid for the supply of computers for the election, assured the Comelec that it will complete the delivery of 80,136 PCOS machines with 2,064 spare units by February 21, 2010.

Full delivery of the PCOS machines will be in compliance with the 25-page contract for the provision of an automatic election system for the May 10 polls which it had signed with the poll body on July 10, 2009.

As of December 30, 2009, Smartmatic-TIM had already delivered 7,200 machines and promised to continue the delivery at the rate of 9,600 units every week until the end of February 2010.

The clustering of 329,389 established precincts to only 75,471 resulted from Comelec’s approval of en banc Resolution 8699 allowing for up to seven precincts per cluster.

It amended Resolution 8647 which earlier limited to five the number of precincts that could be clustered.

Since only one PCOS machine will be deployed for every cluster, the Comelec said it will have a total of 6,739 surplus units that should be sufficient to serve as backups during the elections.

As amended, Item No. 3 of the guidelines on the clustering/grouping of established precincts reads: “3. Clustered/grouped precincts shall not exceed seven (7) precincts taking into account the equitable distribution of the number of registered voters per precinct and the aggregate number of registered voters in the clustered/grouped precincts shall not exceed One Thousand (1,000).

The Comelec, led by Chairman Jose A. R. Melo, said Resolution 8647 had to be amended because based on the Project of Precincts (POPs) submitted by election officers as of July 20, 2009, the total number of clustered precincts stood at 85,316, but the number of PCOS under the supply contract was only 80,136 with 2,064 spares.

“There is a need to adjust the number of established precincts to be clustered/grouped in order not to exceed from the allocation of the Precinct Count Optical Scan machines for 1,000 registered voters per cluster/group,” the poll body said.

Fears were expressed earlier that there could be a shortage of poll counting machines for the election exercise, either due to malfunctions or a failure of the contractor to deliver all the machines on time.