By LUZ RIMBAN
THE Commission on Elections has ruled out the possibility of a failure of elections if the still untested automated system fails in the May 2010 elections.
Instead of declaring a failure of elections, however, Comelec will simply declare a “failure of the project” and revert to the manual system.
Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez assured journalists who attended the recently concluded Philippine Press Institute workshop on covering 2010 automated elections in Cagayan de Oro City that there won’t be a “failure of elections” scenario that some critics fear could lead to a political crisis.
“We will resort to a manual count,” Jimenez said in answer to questions that hackers could tap into the system and manipulate the vote count that could result in discrepancies in tallies.
Jimenez said it is unlikely that hackers could manipulate the system and do widespread electronic dagdag-bawas or padding and shaving of votes since each Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine is a stand-alone unit detached from the rest of the system.
The Comelec will be rolling out 82,200 PCOS machines to more than 81,000 precincts nationwide. The machines will scan the ballots which will be printed on special paper. When the polls close at 6 p.m. on election day, the machines will then tally the votes. The election results will then be transmitted to municipality via cell phone or landline connections.
“We know some machines will fail,” Jimenez said. This is the reason there will be more machines than precincts, he added. But he estimates only less than 5 percent of all machines will suffer “outright failure” and will need to be replaced.
Jimenez said he expects that voting to be uneventful, and without the chaos and tension that has marked elections, especially in hotly contested races in some areas.
He also explained that after the 11-hour voting period from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., there will be a window of only 15 minutes for the results to become official, and a two-minute period while the results are transmitted to the town or city canvassers.
Jimenez said he also expects that results will be questioned in some places, as in every election in the past, but these are unlikely to lead of a failure of elections.
Jimenez and Smartmatic-TIM demonstration manager Miguel Avila replied to questions posed by participants in the PPI’s three-day national workshop on civic journalism which focused on covering the automated 2010 elections held in Cagayan de Oro City from Oct 19 to 21.
Avila said many of the questions about rules and procedures will be covered in the general instructions to be distributed to all teachers, watchers, election inspectors and the public.
Both Avila and Jimenez assured PPI participants that although still untested, the system cannot be hacked externally and that it would be difficult to rig the system.
The system, they said, removes human intervention that has made it easy for cheaters to subvert the process.
But Avila said, “What is not automated is the registration of voters.” Still ongoing, voter registration continues until the end of October, and is administered by election officials in every city and municipality in the country.