MANILA, Philippines?The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has started to train around 250,000 public school teachers who will act as board of election inspectors (BEIs) in the country's first national automated polls in May.

?There will be 500 simultaneous training sessions of teachers nationwide for the whole month of March focusing on the new poll duties of BEIs like the operation of the poll machines to generate and print the Election Returns (ERs) and transmit them via telcos to Comelec servers,? said Comelec Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal, head of the steering committee on automation.

The teachers will be in charge of 76,000 clustered precincts nationwide, Gregorio told INQUIRER.net.

In a separate interview, Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM) said the company trained last month 500 Comelec personnel on the automated election system. They will in turn train the BEIs.

Larrazabal said the duties of teachers in the 2010 polls will be ?easier? than during the manual election system as almost all stages are automated.

Under the poll automation plan, the BEI chairman and other officers will be trained to operate the counting machine, which automatically counts, consolidates and transmits votes.

The BEI chairman is also tasked to certify the election returns printed by the machine through digital keys or signatures which will be randomly assigned by the election commission, said Comelec spokesman James Jimenez in another interview.