MANILA, Philippines—With poll automation bid winners Smartmatic and International and Total Information Management Corp. (TIM) back on track for the 2010 polls, machines with “guaranteed 100 percent accuracy” are expected to arrive as early as November, an official said.

Smartmatic spokesman Cesar Flores said the consortium would start getting the parts for the machines, which are enabled with Precinct Count Optical Scan Technology (PCOST), and send the initial models in November, six months ahead of the 2010 national elections.

Although the balloting will remain manual, it will take only about three days to finish the entire canvassing, he said.

If an average voter finishes in 10 seconds, a voting center with 3,600 voters will finish in 10 hours, making the voting system faster and more convenient, Flores said.

He gave assurances poll fraud would be extremely hard to do with their machines, citing the PCOST’s high technology features like passwords, ballot scanning, data encryption, file back-ups, and top of the line file transmissions. The machine also does not recognize fraudulent, tainted, or photocopied ballots.

“In the machine, every ballot that is read is going to be stored…there is a 100 percent audit trail,” said Flores in a meeting with the Philippine Daily Inquirer, parent company of INQUIRER.net, Friday night.

“Every machine has its own personality. If the machine is only for a precinct with 800 registered voters, it cannot read over 800 ballots,” he added, noting that the machines have batteries good for the entire voting day, hence any power interruption won’t be much of an issue.

He said that once voting has been officially over, the machines will no longer receive new ballots. The data, like the number of votes for a certain candidate, encrypted in the machine will then be transmitted through a cellular phone, landline, or satellite.

“From that point on, there’ll be no more human intervention…and just think about it, we only have a window of opportunity for only two minutes,” Flores said, emphasizing that anyone who tries to intercept the data will have to try their luck at trying to get the files in random time.

Thirty copies of election returns will also be printed, Flores said, noting that traditionally copies of ERs are limited in number.