The Philippine Supreme Court has upheld the government's $150 million deal with a Barbados-based firm to automate the 2010 general election, dismissing a petition from a lawyers' group to cancel the contract. Lawmakers, political groups, information technology experts, and analysts have cast doubts over the automated process, fearing machine breakdowns and delays in result transmission that could lead to a failed election and political limbo. Such scenarios are making local financial markets nervous. Here are some questions and answers on the government's move to automate the vote count in the country: Why automate the elections? Hounded by allegations of poll fraud and manipulation of vote counts in past elections, the Philippines has embarked on a major project to automate voting, using machines that can scan ballots, print and transmit results that could declare winners within two hours at the local level and about 36 hours at the national level. About 82,200 precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines will be deployed nationwide. Each machine is programmed to read about 1,000 ballots from four to five polling precincts at 350,000 locations across the archipelago. The elections commission said the automation process will minimise human intervention in the process and reduce allegations of fraud. It would speed up the process, giving it a result within two days instead of the weeks it has taken in the past. Can automation work? Information technology experts have expressed fears over the potential vulnerabilities of an automated system. Virtus Gil, a retired general and head of the government's cybersecurity office, said electronic voting also increases the potential for large-scale fraud. Experts say there is no real foolproof system and have listed a number of potential causes to disrupt the machines and make transmission of election results difficult. Potential problems listed by experts include hacking and “system buffer overflow”, which can result in corrupted data and crashes. What happens next? Critics fear that allies of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo could exploit any perceived malfunction in the automation process to invalidate the election. Candidates could lean on irregularities and flaws to contest results and a massive failure in the process could result in a power vacuum if no winners were declared on June 30, 2010 when terms of office of all elected officials, from the president down to municipal councillors, expire. Any potential civil unrest could be used as a pretext for declaring martial law and extending Arroyo's term beyond June 2010. Arroyo is not eligible to contest the election under term limits for elected officials. Critics accuse her and her allies of pushing constitutional amendments to remove those limits, but it appears they are running out of time for such revisions. Thus, her critics are worried that Arroyo and her allies may be pushing flawed automated balloting to create a scenario that might work in her favor. What are officials saying? Election commission officials are confident the automated balloting will succeed, saying they have been preparing for all possible technical problems. Jose Tolentino, executive director of the Commission on Elections, said the machines would use a 128-bit encryption process that would make it difficult for hackers to grab the transmitted data. He said the machines would only access the main elections commission server upon transmission and not during the data encryption process, thus minimising exposure to potential cyber attack. The poll agency said voting would still be done manually and only the counting would be automated, allowing manual tallying if machines break down. It added there was enough spare machines to replace any defective and malfunctioning ones.
