It was a Herculean task, tongues clacking and pressure mounting by the hour, to print 50,850,000 ballots for an election debut. At first, the National Printing Office could not print faster than 500,000 a day, but after some re-conditioning 1,000 workers and casuals saw that a million a day was doable.

Thus the race was run, two days ahead of schedule last week, toasted with champagne. But what happens after the ballots have been tested, vacuum-sealed, labeled and packed into 77,000 black boxes? Smartmatic, playing it smart, said, “That’s no longer our job.”

In sum, the output must tally with the exact number of registered voters, no more and no less, to be picked up from ground zero at NPO’s sprawling, suddenly accommodating but dusty basement. Boxes bound for Luzon are strapped in yellow, to be distributed over land by PhilPost; those for Visayas (green) and Mindanao (blue) by air and over water by Air Speed and Air 21.

“Nothing to worry about,” assured Cesar Flores of Venezuela, country manager of Smartmatic. “The only cultural change even without automation is the ballot. The Australian ballot, as it is called, is 100 years old, and most countries in the world use the shading method.”

Certainly, but how many of those countries have 600 names on the ballot?