Coming from a history of election fraud and violence, it should have been no surprise that the same old problems were reported during the elections a month ago.

The first ever automated national elections with more than 50.7 million registered voters is still ongoing as of writing time since the transmission of the data to the national canvassing server is slow mainly due to problems of transmission in several areas of the country. As clear winners emerge in both national and local polls, it seems that although Comelec claims that they have successfully conducted the May 2010 elections, they cannot clearly say that the automated election system (AES) was a resounding success.

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).

It might come as expected to a lot of us by now that the Comelec’s automated election system (AES) encounters one problem after another. Recently, news came out that the markings on the ballots for the May polls are unreadable by the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines that will be used in the upcoming national and local elections. According to the Comelec itself, errors in the ultraviolet (UV) markings printed on the ballots are due to the high-speed printing process used by Smartmatic.

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.

With less than 100 days left before the May 2010 elections, the implementation of the automated election system or AES of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) continues to tread in dangerous waters. Volunteers from the Computer Professionals Union (CPU) witnessed the field test of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) in Pateros and Taguig on January 29. We are sharing the following excerpts from the CPU volunteers’ report.