TAIPEI, Taiwan--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A delegation of Comelec representatives, lawmakers and election watchdogs visited Taiwan this week to personally observe the manufacturing process of Vote Counting Machines (VCMs).

The group included Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista; Comelec Director James Jimenez; Congressmen Oscar Rodriguez and Nicasio Aliping Jr. from the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee (JCOC); Congressman Fred Castro and Committee Secretary Debbie Ann Soriano-Garcia from the House Committee on Suffrage & Electoral Reforms. Members of the media and the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, also joined the tour.

The trip was led by Smartmatic, the service provider for the VCMs which will be used in the 2016 Philippine elections. It involved viewing two facilities crucial to production; the Mainboard Factory and the Production & Assembly Factory.

“We are proud to show that our factories are world-class, state-of-the-art, and completely secure,” says Elie Moreno, Smartmatic-TIM2016 Project Director. “Smartmatic is on-track to complete and deliver the VCMs on schedule,” he adds.

Of the total 93,977 VCMs, Smartmatic will deliver 21,000 VCMs by the end of December 2015. 30,000 VCMs will arrive by the middle of January 2016, and the remaining VCMs will be delivered by the end of January.

The Mainboard Factory has been developing components for Smartmatic since 2005 and has produced over 200,000 to date. It has over 200 employees and is equipped with several Surface Mount Technology (SMT) lines, each capable of more than one million mainboards every 24 hours.

The Production & Assembly Factory is a larger facility and has over 700 employees. With multiple SMT and assembly lines, it is capable of producing a monthly output of more than 500,000 network/peripheral devices and approximately 50,000 IPC/Embedded systems.

Both factories have been awarded the ISO9001, ISO14001 and OHSAS18001, among other certifications.

About Smartmatic

Smartmatic focuses on creating technology and offering services that have a profound social impact. By helping governments conduct more transparent and efficient elections, we have processed over 2.5 billion auditable, secret and secure votes in elections in five continents.

Smartmatic employs over 600 people in the US, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Mexico, Barbados, Haiti, Brazil, Panama, Venezuela, Philippines, United Arab Emirates and Taiwan.