Voters will still have to show up to cast their ballots at polling precincts on May 10. But by doing away with the cumbersome manual count, the new system is expected to name the winning president within 30 hours instead of after several days or weeks as before.

The government has awarded contracts worth three billion pesos (about 54 million dollars) for hardware, software and satellite links to register voters, count ballots and bounce official returns to the national canvassing center, election officials said.

Using computers reduces opportunities to commit fraud although it cannot prevent "the problem of coercion, terrorism and vote-buying," said Benjamin Abalos, head of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), the official polls watchdog.

"For the first time only real people can vote. No more birds, no more bees, no more turtles," he said, alluding to previous problems in the rebellion-torn southern Philippines where ballots have been cast by corrupt officials in the name of non-existent voters.

French-made data-capture machines are to record the pictures, fingerprints and other biometrics of every single voter.

These have so far flushed out 600,000 spurious or non-qualified individuals, including minors in Manila and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao in the south, Abalos said.

Meanwhile automated-counting machines, similar to those used in South Korea, are to reject fake ballots and count at least 40 ballot papers per minute.

Assuming an 80 percent turnout, the nearly 2,000 computers that Comelec has so far bought will in theory be able to count all votes from some 42,000 precincts and come out with the results by midnight on election day.

Jose Tolentino, the Comelec official in charge of the project, said a "magnetic ink character recognition" security feature would be used on ballots, similar to those used to print bank checks.

Only five security printing companies in the Philippines are authorized to use such technology. All their machines will be "sequestered for two months" from the start of the campaign period on February 9 to prevent them from printing extra ballots, he said.

Abalos said 40 million people, half the national population, were qualified to vote in the elections, where President Gloria Arroyo is expected to face stiff competition.

Aside from the president and vice president, some 48,000 other positions, including congressmen, mayors and governors, are at stake. Some 200,000 candidates are expected to register starting on December 15.

Abalos also expected the new system to reduce violence common in past polls, when scores of candidates, campaign workers and innocent civilians were murdered during campaigning for hotly contested positions.

"It is in the delay of disseminating the results that somehow generates fear in the minds of people that results are being manipulated," Abalos, a former local politician, told a media briefing.

Abalos claimed he lost the mayoral contest of a Manila suburb in 1980 when school teachers and police officers tampered with the election returns as a police squad car transported the documents to the Comelec office.

"I have been the victim of cheating. That's why I would never allow cheating ever to happen here," he said.

SPACE.WIRE