Voters get first taste of automated polling
Voting with the use of Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machine is easy and simple. This was the common observation of participants in last Thursday’s public orientation on next year’s automated election.
Commission on Elections (Comelec) regional director Atty. Dennis Ausan said voters were given an overview of how easy it is to cast their votes with the use of PCOS machine during last week’s roadshow of the counting machines.
Ausan said the people who attended the presentation of the equipment appreciate the use of PCOS in next year’s first poll automation. It is the first public display of the counting machines. The roadshow will continue in the different cities and municipalities in the region.
The region has been allotted with one counting machine to brief and provide the voters an idea on how the machine looks like and how to use it during the election, said Ausan.
The Comelec has ordered 82,000 PCOS machines to the winning bidder Smartmatic-TIM. Of the 82,000 PCOS machines, 80,000 will be installed in polling precincts while the rest are for back up in case of machine breakdown.
The roadshow continues even after the Center for People Empowerment in Governance filed a petition for mandamus before the Supreme Court to force the Comelec to disclose the source code of the PCOS.
A source code is a mechanism encoded as human-readable combination of numbers, letters, punctuation marks and symbols which tells the specific actions done by a computer.
Meanwhile, Ausan encouraged first time voters to register before the October 31, 2009 deadline. Let us not wait for the last day to register. The Comelec has given enough time to register but it is always our habit to register on the last day, Ausan noted.
In Iloilo City, the Comelec has set up a registration center at the Robinson’s Place and different universities to give leeway to students who could not come to the Comelec office to register.
The Comelec offices are ready to accommodate the registrants. Next year’s election is historic since it will be the first time that there will be poll automation in the country’s election history, said Ausan.