As some sectors have warned that the system automating the elections next year could be vulnerable to hacking, Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Armando Velasco yesterday said he is planning to propose the imposition of stiffer penalty against those who will be found hacking into the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines that will be used in the simultaneous national and local polls.

Velasco said hacking into the computerized poll system is tantamount to "electoral sabotage" and therefore its commission should prompt a heavier punishment than what the present law calls for.

"I will push for graduated penalty because (hacking is tantamount to) electoral sabotage. I will recommend to the (Comelec) en banc (the imposition of) stiffer penalty (against hacking), so that whoever attempts to hack the system will be punished severely," he said during the four-day seminar sponsored by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) in Subic, Zambales.

He, though, did not say when he plans to raise the recommendation.

Asked how severe a penalty is he looking at, Velasco said he would recommend life imprisonment against violators.

While saying there is no fool proof machine, he said he believes hackers would, however, have difficulty in getting into the PCOS system because of its security features.

"It will take so much time before they could hack it because there are a lot of (security) combinations," he said.

The issue of hacking was among those raised in the PCIJ seminar entitled "Covering Automated Elections and Campaign Finance."

The elections scheduled in May next year, where voters will be choosing new national leaders from the President down to the municipal or city councilors, will the first ever to be conducted via automation, or with the use of computerized machines.

The full automation of the polls was confirmed after the Supreme Court Tuesday last week upheld the validity of the P7.2-billion contract forged by the Comelec with the consortium of Smartmatic-Total Information Management Corp. for the supply of 82,200 PCOS machines for use in the elections.

Voting 11-3, the high court junked the petition filed before it by the Concerned Citizens Movement led by UP professor, Atty. Harry Roque, seeking the nullification of the contract.

In automated elections, voters will go through the process of casting their ballots far different from the former usual manual system. In the machine-processed procedure, they will be shading slots that correspond to the names of the candidates they are choosing to fill the various national and local positions on a ballot that will afterward be fed into a computer.

With the new system, the Comelec said winning candidates, specifically in the local positions, would be proclaimed a few hours after the polls close. This is due to the seen big improvement in efficiency from the previous manual elections, where the proclamation of winning candidates usually took several days.

Meanwhile, the businessman son of former Speaker and Pangasinan Rep. Jose de Venecia Jr. yesterday warned the Comelec that it must first resolve "some very serious issues" before proceeding with the full automation of the polls next year.

According to Jose "Joey" de Venecia III, one of those issues is the length of time of the new voting process. He pointed out that the time it will take for a voter to cast his ballot in the automated elections would take much longer than before.

"The Comelec should conduct a time and motion study first before taking such a gung ho attitude to automation. I have conducted informal studies on this matter alone and they indicate that it may take up to 10 times longer for every voter to complete the voting process," he said in a press statement.

He moreover noted that since the number of voting precincts will be reduced, there will be more voters massing in them next year.

From more than 200,000 voting precincts in the past – which are usually in the public schools all over the country – the number will be reduced to 80,000. This means that the number per precinct will increase threefold, he added.

Another thing, De Venecia said, is the introduction of the new ballot.

He said the Comelec’s newly designed ballot is double sided and will have some 300 names of candidates to choose from unlike in the past where the voter only had to fill in the names of his choice of President, Vice President and 12 senators.

"The time it will take to fill in the ballot will also increase substantially. If it took a minute to complete one’s ballot before, it will now take three or even four minutes, given the new form that the electorate is not used to," he said.

De Venecia said under an informal time and motion study he conducted he found that the typical voter will have to look for his new precinct, join a much longer queue, then fill in a type of ballot that he has never seen before.

He warned this extended period in voters casting their ballots could cause for so many things to go wrong.

"Everything points to a chaotic May 2010 elections. I don’t want to seem like some kind of prophet of doom, but the chaotic voting day scenario could lead to a failure of elections. What this can lead to is anybody’s guess," he said.

De Venecia then suggested that the full automation of the polls next year should only be applied in the National Capital Region. He said if voting goes smoothly enough in Metro manila, then full nationwide automation can be applied in the barangay elections in the latter part of 2010.