On May 10, 2010, there will be 50,723,734 registered voters from 42,025 barangays in 1,497 municipalities and 137 cities located in 80 provinces in 16 regions trooping to 76,340 clustered precincts in different parts of the country to cast their votes in our first automated local and national elections.

As a public service to the readers of this column, let me share some salient features of the historic automated voting on May 10, 2010, as follows:

• No “replacement” ballot will be issued to any voter whose first ballot is invalidated for any reason – unlike in the past elections (manual voting) when a second ballot is issued in case the first ballot is invalidated by reason of erasures, markings or for any other reason. Hence, the urgency of knowing how to fill up the official ballot correctly.

• In the past elections (manual voting), no names of candidates were written in the official ballots. In the forthcoming May 10, 2010 (automated voting) elections, the names of candidates are pre-printed in the official ballots.

• In the past elections, the voter has to WRITE the names of the candidates in the official ballots. In the official ballots of the forthcoming May 10th election, the voter will just shade the OVAL figure placed in the official ballots opposite the names of the candidates.

• In the past elections, there were about 200 voters per precinct compared to the present election set-up where there is a maximum of 1,000 votes per clustered precinct.

• In the past elections, voting time was from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. In the present automated election, the voting time is from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

• In the past elections, official ballots were non-precinct specific. Today’s automated election has official ballots which are precinct-specific ballots. This being so, the official ballots for municipality A cannot be used as official ballots for municipality B, even if both municipalities are from the same province.

• In the past elections, the filed-up official ballots were personally dropped by the voter to a steel ballot box. In today’s automated elections, the voter will personally feed or insert his/her ballot into the so-called PCO (precinct count optical scan) machine where both sides of the valid official ballot are scanned simultaneously. There are about 80,136 PCOs machines that are going to be distributed to an estimated 76,340 clustered precincts all around the country. Comelec provides for some spare PCO machines in selected clustered precincts in some municipalities and/or cities.

• In the past elections, there is manual counting for the data found in the Election Returns (ERs). In today’s automated elections, the election returns (ERs) are being printed directly by the PCOs machine, after completion of the automated counting.

(To be continued)

Have a joyful day!