MANILA, Philippines - Delays are not the only problems facing the Commission on Elections in automating the May 10 polls.

Comelec Spokesman James Jimenez said the poll body has received reports that 5,000 signal jammers or SIM blockers have been brought into the country, which could disrupt the transmisson of data on election day.

Jimenez said the Comelec is working on counter-measures to prevent the signal jammers from disrupting the transmission of election results to the Comelec central office. He said the poll body could use a device that would block the jamming equipment or it could bring in more broadband global area network satellite antennas as a contingency measure.

The issue of transmission of the poll results came to the fore last Friday after Smartmatic-TIM precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines, which will be used in the May 10 elections, failed to transmit the election data to Comelec's central servers using GSM. A Comelec official said poll oficers used satellite communication instead of GSM to transmit the data.

Smartmatic International Sales Director Cesar Flores, meanwhile, said the company has acquired 5,000 satellite antennas for areas in the Philippines that have no stable telecommunication capacity.

Flores said lack of a telecommunications signal or GSM signal, would hinder the electronic transmission of results from the precincts to the municipal, provincial, and national canvassing.

Delays in ballot printing

A Comelec official, meanwhile, dismissed talk that delays in the schedule for the printing of ballots could endanger the country's first automated nationwide polls.

Comelec law department head Ferdinand Rafanan said the printing of the ballots will now start on February 7 and will be finished 2 weeks before the April 25 deadline. "This will give us enough time to do double or final checking of the official ballots to make sure that the delivery is correct," he said.

Jimenez earlier said the latest delay will not change other parts of the Comelec’s schedule of preparations for the May 10 polls. He said that the postponement would actually give them more time to control the quality of the ballot.

The Comelec had earlier decided to postpone the printing of ballots to wait for the resolution of disqualification cases against candidates at the national and local levels so that the ballots would, as much as possible, reflect the final and accurate list of candidates.

The Comelec has to print some 1,700 unique sets of ballots to reflect the national candidates and the local bets specific to towns and cities.