The Philippines will have its first ever automated elections in May 2010. Through special legislation by congress, the Philippine government passed an automation law starting with the 2010 national elections and providing an appropriation of more than P11 billion for its implementation.

Past Philippines election returns were manually counted and takes several days, sometimes months to finish, allowing cheating and other election fraud in the process. Automation seeks to correct these defects.

What is automation?

Election automation involves only the tabulation of votes, not the actual casting of votes. Voters will be given pre-printed ballots, where they will mark their preferred candidates by shading the circles under the names of their choice. Ballots are then fed into a voting district counting machine, where votes are automatically tallied and forwarded to municipal and national servers. The counting machines will transmit election returns encrypted, and will print out eight copies for the various political parties and voting watchdogs to cross-check manually.

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