QUEZON City, Philippines -- A group of computer science professors and concerned information technology professionals said that while the plans to automate elections in the country is good, they still want to know how the Commission on Elections (Comelec) intends to implement it.

Weighing the technologies proposed by the Comelec, the members of the Computing Society of the Philippines (CSP) said the use of direct recording electronic (DRE) and the optical-mark reader (OMR) technologies have both their advantages and disadvantages.

But as they went on to dissect the plans of the Comelec, it was evident that there were still some questions that needed answering.

Pablo Manalastas, Ateneo professor of the computer science and senior professorial lecturer in the University of the Philippines, said that the Republic Act 9369 requires that the election returns should be transmitted electronically and digitally signed.

For that to happen, Manalastas said an infrastructure is required to use digital signatures during the automated elections. Verifying digital signatures, for one, requires a digital certificate authority that should be managed by a third party.

Manalastas said the Comelec does not fully understand the importance of the digital signatures in the automated election system.

Manalastas who was an observer during the demonstration of technologies in the Comelec, said that the digital certificate authority should be an agency that people could trust.

He suggested that government agencies like the Department of Science and Technology, the Commission on Information and Communications Technology, the Bureau of Census or even state universities as possible agencies to run the certificate authority.

Meanwhile, Ito Gruet, director of the Philippine Software Industry Association, suggested that an ideal automated election system should be a hybrid system that combines the manual process of tabulating votes and the encoding of election returns into a web-based, centralized database that would be accessible to the public.

Gruet said the OMR and DRE technologies could push the results of election results online but it has not been proposed.

Gruet said that a group of computer professionals have proposed an open-source based automated election system that is web-based and could be given for free to the government. A prototype is now available, she said.