MANILA - A group of former Cabinet officials and senior government executives on Friday urged the Philippine government to consider postponing the automation of the 2010 national elections or implement partial automation of the canvassing of election returns.

In a statement, the Former Senior Government Officials (FSGO) criticized the haphazard manner that the Commission on Elections awarded the poll automation contract for the 2010 elections as experts and non-experts alike have raised doubts about the integrity of the Precinct Counting Optical Scan system offered by Smartmatic-TIM.

It said the fears raised by several sectors in the legal and IT communities mirror "a general distrust not only in the Comelec as the guardian of the democratic vote, but also in the institutions of government that have been so stripped of credibility by years and years of assault and abuse."

"Because trust is so low on those who govern our nation, and the selected automated system has not been adequately tested, our first proposal is to postpone use of this controversial system until the barangay elections or even the mid-term elections of 2013, not in the 2010 national election. If that alternative does not find popular support, the best compromise seems to be automating only the canvassing of election returns, and leaving ballots to still be written out by the voter," the FSGO said.

The group said partial automation would allow the public to monitor manual counting at the precinct level while speeding up canvass of the votes at succeeding levels, the parts of the election process most susceptible to cheating and to delays.

The FSGO said absence of adequate safeguards in the proposed automation system gives rise to credible fears that the proposed automated counting and canvass would be tampered. It said some of the concerns raised about the automation process involve the failure of time-and-motion studies of the actual voting process and the use of only two specially-designed felt tip pens per voting precinct.

Other experts noted that the PCOS machines are susceptible to jamming especially since the official ballot would be long and narrow, with several hundred names printed in small font.

The FSGO also noted that Comelec has yet to release the source code of the PCOS system to groups such as the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections, media quick-count organizations and political parties.

The group said that while it is not against the automation of the canvassing of votes, "technology must not, and cannot be allowed to deprive a people of their fundamental right to genuinely free and honest choices."

Private think-tank Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG) earlier identified 30 weak points in the automated election system from ballot printing, warehousing of counting machines to hardware and software deficiencies, voting, counting, electronic transmission of votes to canvassing and proclamation of winners.

CenPEG, a private think tank based in UP Diliman, and in partnership with the UP College of Law, warned of an automation disaster and disenfranchisement of millions of voters if the Comelec and the joint venture of Smartmatic Corp. and Total Information Management Inc. fail to install safeguards and security measures.

CenPEG director for political study Romulo Tuazon said a review of the PCOS source code is important to ensure that the machines are safe from hacking and internal rigging.