The Commission on Elections (Comelec) shrugged off Wednesday the “no-election scenario” feared by some lawmakers who filed a bill that would allow Congress to hold office until new officials are elected and qualified and who called on Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile to step down in favor of a senator who is not running for reelection as the head of the Upper Chamber will serve as acting President in case of election failure, stressing that the May 10, 2010 polls will push through as scheduled, the votes counted and canvassed accurately, and the winners proclaimed accordingly.

The bill was filed in the House of Representatives by Reps. Jeci Lapus of the 3rd district of Tarlac, Carlos Padilla of Nueva Vizcaya and Edul Pardo Nonato Joson of the first district of Nueva Ecija. In the Senate, the call for Enrile to step down was made by senators defending Sen. Manny Villar on the C-5 road extension project.

The Comelec, led by Chairman Jose A. R. Melo, said each of the 75,471 clustered precincts to be set up in 42,025 barangays, 120 cities and 1,514 municipalities throughout the country will have at least one Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine that will be used in the voting and counting of votes, transmission and consolidation of results and proclamation of winning candidates.

Smartmatic-TIM Corporation, the consortium that won the bid to supply computers for the Comelec poll automation program will complete by February 21 the delivery of 80,136 PCOS machines with 2,064 spare units, and since there are only 75,471 clustered precincts, there will be a surplus of 6,739 poll machines easing the pressure on the poll body in the conduct of the country’s fully automated elections.

Commissioner Gregorio Y. Larrazabal, who was designated by the Comelec as its spokesman on poll automation, earlier told the media that in the remote possibility that PCOS machines bog down, the votes reflected in the ballots used by the electorate to cast their votes can be counted manually.

Larrazabal said manual counting of votes will only be resorted by the Comelec in precincts or polling places where PCOS machines will fail to functions, hence there will be actually no failure of election anywhere in the country where the computers bog down.

If ever there will be a failure of anywhere else in the country, it will not be caused by the computers failure to function but because of other reasons as defined in the Omnibus Election Code such as violence, terrorism, loss or destruction of election paraphernalia or records, force majeure, and other analogous causes of such a nature that the holding of free, orderly ad honest election should become impossible in any political subdivision, it was pointed out.