With just four days before the May 10 elections, Taguig Mayor Freddie Tiñga has ordered city hall personnel to intensify voters’ education on the new automated voting system, which at the moment is still mired by uncertainties.

Tiñga said teams of lecturers headed by Taguig City Legal Officer, lawyer Sheilah Uyboco, have been deployed to the city’s 28 barangays to conduct forums on voters’ education.

“We should not to be intimidated by the automated system of voting, but instead, understand how it works and how we can best protect our votes. People need to know the do’s and don’t’s so that they can be assured that their ballots are properly counted by the machines,” Tiñga said.

During field tests last Monday, these “machines” — the Commission on Election’s (Comelec) Precinct count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines, specifically — failed to properly read votes on ballots reportedly due to a program error with their internal compact flash (CF) cards.

The problem has since been fixed through a subsequent recall and reprogramming of thousands of CF cards, Comelec said.

Tiñga, the outgoing mayor who is running for the congressional seat in Taguig’s second district, Thursday called on his constituents to be optimistic despite the growing apprehensions brought about by the technical glitches of the PCOS machines.

It was a bit of a change of heart from the three-term mayor, who on Wednesday appealed to Comelec to carry out a manual count of votes come Election Day.