MANILA, Philippines – A voting machine short-circuited and emitted smoke during testing at the Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Thursday.

A representative for the lone bidder for the P11-billion election automation project, the Smartmatic-Total Information Management consortium, said the wrong cable was mistakenly used to plug the machine to an electrical outlet.

The precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machine shut down automatically after it short-circuited, protecting the machine from tampering, said Smartmatic-TIM. It also did not accept test ballots that were being fed to it.

“The machines will guard itself from the tampering once its features are tampered, in this case the power source,” the Smartmatic representative said.

The “unintentional demonstration” of the security feature was “very helpful,” said Ferdinand Rafanan, chairman of the Comelec’s Special Bids and Awards Committee.

Anna Valmero