DAGUPAN CITY -- Does the Philippines have enough IT (information technology) experts to man all the poll machines that will be used in the automated 2010 elections?

Senator Francis Escudero raised the doubt during Saturday’s press conference as he pointed out other concerns that he said both the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Smartmatic could not answer.

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Escudero also feared that with automation, the usual manual cheating might become automated and from the retail cheating, it will become wholesale.

“I am not against automation. But I know the strengths and weaknesses of a computer - garbage in, garbage out,” he said.

He reiterated that as presented by the Comelec during the Senate hearings, they will import 82,000 machines for the 2010 polls. About 2,666 machines will undergo test run a day.

“The Comelec will train more or less 240,000 IT experts while Smartmatic will train more or less 40,000. That would be 260,000 IT experts nationwide. However, the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) could not answer whether we have such number of IT experts,” he said.

Escudero slammed the poll body for its unpreparedness and inability to answer the loopholes seen this early concerning the automated polls.

“The Comelec is blinded by their desire to automate. They are pushing for automation for the sake of automating. They are not even preparing, they're not doing their homework, they're not studying it, they don't understand what Smartmatic does or will do,” he stressed.

The senator said the Comelec and Smartmatic are pointing fingers at each other as to whose responsibility is distributing the machines to all the polling precincts, who will map the whole country as to where these precincts are, and what technology will be used to transmit the votes from far-flung places, among others.