MAKATI Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. has an unsolicited advice to politicians who refuse to lose in elections now that results for the poll automation in 2010 are tamper-proof: Resort to vote-buying.

"Since you can’t cook elections manually anymore and no one can cook electronically, spend your 80 percent kickbacks on vote-buying. That is still allowed, that’s my advice," Locsin (PDP-Laban) said.

Locsin, chair of the committee on suffrage and electoral reforms and one of the primary authors of the poll automation law, shrugged aside fears by Sen. Francis Escudero of a fear of failure of elections in 2010 because of the untested automated voting system.

"The only thing that can cause failure of elections is a rogue meteor striking the Earth or manual voting fraudulently electing the next president. The smart and good will bank on automated elections," he said.

Ferdinand Rafanan, director of the Commission on Elections’ Law Department, has warned that they may revert to manual counting if the contract with Smartmatic and Total Information Management Inc (TIM) is not signed by Tuesday.

The Senate committee on electoral reforms chaired by Escudero last week advised the Comelec to defer the signing the contract as questions remain unanswered about Smartmatic/TIM capability.

Sen. Mar Roxas asked Comelec to give full assurance that there will not be any hitch in the poll automation.

Roxas expressed his concerns in a letter this week to Melo where he asked the following questions:

"Is the Comelec prepared with contingency measures in the event of technical failure or destruction of the counting machines? What are these contingency measures?"

"What proof shall Comelec have to show that voters are properly informed on how to vote using the machine-readable ballot? What is the level of accuracy or degree of confidence?"

"What plans do the Comelec have to address a likely scenario of voters trooping to the polling stations in the morning on Election Day possibly causing long queues of voters waiting their turn to feed the ballots into the counting machine?"

"How will the polling stations be configured so that voters will not have to go out of the polling stations, with the ballot that they had just filled, to another room where the counting machine is stationed?"

"What are the Comelec rules governing the conduct of a random manual audit? Specifically, when is it undertaken? What will prevail in cases where discrepancy between the machine count and the random manual audit count occurs?