Wise men, knowledgeable men, ignorant men, experts and bums agree: The forthcoming automated elections are a cause for worry. Should you and I worry that they’re such worrywarts?

Even if you and I were technophobes, would it change the fact that 45 million citizens will be participating in an experiment for the first time, across 44,000 barangays in 7,107 islands, not counting mountains and hills?

If the tests conducted last week are any indication, there’s going to be quite a jam on election day – hopefully not the machines, but maybe something else.

The voters, for one. How many of them have ever fed a card into an ATM? How fast do they read, the instructions as well as the 600 names on the ballot? How patient are they going to be when they see the long queues? (Remember the endless lines of people waiting – and failing – to be registered as voters last month?)

The “clustering” of precincts is another source of stickiness. After voters find their new precinct, they’ll also find so many other voters all at once, and then they’ll be pushing, fretting for their turn to shade their choices ever so carefully – not too dark and not too light, not outside the outline but just so, etc. How many machines will they encounter?

Under ideal circumstances of perfect machines and efficient voters, extraneous factors would still be a threat. Power outages. Weak cell sites. Invalidated ballots causing low-tech delays. Sabotage. The usual suspects on election day: mischief, malice, malfeasance and magic.