Relax, it’s only a computer.

Smartmatic’s Gene Gregorio and Mike Avila held a demo for “Bulong Pulungan” at Sofitel and assured us, it’s the same good old, bad old manual voting, only the counting and transmission are hi-tech.

Tips to remember.

Bring your “codigo.” Do not overvote. Do not overshade the tiny ovals. You have two chances to vote, in case you make an honest mistake. Don’t panic.

The ballot will be rejected by the machine if it’s fake or marked. Feeding it into the computer takes two seconds, just let go of the paper and it will drop into the ballot box directly under the computer. Return the black marking pen. And you’re done for the day.

At 6 p.m., closing time, three minutes are all that’s needed to relay one computer’s tally. Four to six hours later, we’ll know who’s the next president of the Republic.

My concerns are low-tech. Each precinct cluster has one computer only, which could spell crowding, which could spell confusion, even with 500 trainors trained by Smartmatic, even with a maximum of 1,000 voters per cluster.

But each time a question was raised about order, security and safety, the reply was aptly smart: "It's up to Comelec."