More than a week after the elections, lingering issues on the automated election system and the allegations of fraud coming from the left and right still keep us on the edge each morning as we read the news. The election was an improvement only in the sense that it is being compared to the speed of the old manual method but it is a failure when held to its promises of having a fraud-free and clean elections.

The automated election system that will be used on Monday is a complex collection of several component subsystems that is expected to function as one during election day. These subsystems are expected to pass on verified tallies of the results at each stage of the polling process. If any one of them fail, there would be problems with regard to the veracity of the final count and tally that will be used as the basis for proclaiming winners of the electoral contest.

It might come as a surprise to local readers to know that actual voting for the May 2010 national elections have already started for many Filipinos abroad. In many of our embassies and consulates, overseas citizens have already cast their choices for president, vice president, senators and party-list. Some voting centers like Hong Kong and Singapore are using the same Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines that are to be deployed throughout the country for the automated election system (AES).

Last week’s column which tackled our time-motion simulations made a lot of people worry about one of the aspects of the upcoming automated election system (AES): the possibility of a long line of voters unlike what we used to have in the past elections.

The upcoming May 2010 elections is an experiment of sorts. We will have the first automated national elections with more than 50.7 million registered voters. Voters from more than 329,000 precincts will troop to 76,000 clustered precincts (CP). Each CP will have at most one precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machine for around 1000 voters.

With the May 2010 presidetial elections coming in only two months, citizens groups have raised their concerns regarding the conduct of the first nationwide automation of our elections. Groups such as the anti-fraud and election monitoring group Kontra Daya have called on the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to “walk the talk” regarding its claim that all systems are in place for the Automated Election System (AES) and only an earthquake can stop the May 2010 elections.