The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Saturday allayed fears that the impending power shortage and a potential breakdown of the counting machines to be used in the May 10, 2010 polls could lead to a failure of elections.

Comelec’s legal department chief Ferdinand Rafanan said that with their back-up plans in place, a failure of elections is “practically impossible.”

“We have contingency plans on all problems that may arise during the elections and they get fine-tuned as we approaches Election Day,” Rafanan said.

Rafanan said people need not worry about brownouts on Election Day as each of the 82,200 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines to be supplied by Smartmatic-TIM Corp. have a 12-hour battery backup.

Aside from the more than 80,000 voting machines, there are also around 2,500 machines serving as backup, he said.

He also said there are around 45,000 information technology (IT) people that will be assigned to handle the machines which will be deployed to all precincts nationwide.

Rafanan noted that under the Omnibus Election Code, there are only three instances where a failure of elections may be declared. These are: no election was actually held; there was election but it was suspended; and a problem occurred during the transmission of the election returns.

A failure of election, he said, may be caused by terrorism, fraud, violence, force majeure, and other analogous causes.

Earlier, some politicians expressed doubts over the automated elections, saying that potential machine breakdown and delays in result transmission could lead to a failed election.

Fears that next year’s elections could result in a failure was intensified by the warning recently made by Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes that the country might face energy shortage in 2010.