The Commission on Elections (Comelec) ruled out on Friday the possibility of automating the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections scheduled in October this year.

Comelec Spokesperson James Jimenez said an automated barangay and SK polls are highly unlikely because that would entail another contract with Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM).

“We leased the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines for the (May) 2010 elections only. And if we were to automate the barangay elections, we would need to open up a new contract and go through the bidding and the whole process again,” he said.

Jimenez said the poll body will revert to the manual system instead of the automated elections system (AES) since there will be no need for consolidation under the barangay and SK elections.

“It’s likely to be manual... because we do not have consolidation on a nationwide scale for barangay and SK elections. It becomes more expensive in the sense that you are not utilizing the system to its capacity … takes a lot longer,” he stressed.

But the Comelec official entertained the idea of an automated election process for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) in August next year.

Meantime, the Comelec will resume the registration of voters for the next local and national elections, with July 1 as the tentative date for the poll body to process applications.