MANILA, Philippines--It?s the queues, stupid!

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) was more concerned with debugging a high-tech computer system it overlooked a basic age-old problem?a heavy voter turnout and resulting long lines to the precincts, officials said Monday.

Comelec consultant Marvin Beduya said the plan on the ?queuing process? for Monday?s balloting was not followed Monday.

?The BEIs (Board of Election Inspectors) did not have enough rehearsals for such a major change. This is a failure of change management in applying a major innovation like automated elections in a very constrained environment of clustering (the precincts),? Beduya said.

In interviews with the Inquirer, Beduya had expressed fears about disenfranchisement of voters if the people thronging the voting centers were not managed properly.

?Voters, as clients of Comelec, ought not be made to wait even if some lining up seems good optics on TV. I see long queues as a failure of management,? he said in his analysis of Monday?s balloting on his website.

?Most of the preparations have been on the technology adoption and very little on polling center management and especially on avoiding congestion from clustering,? Beduya said.

The Comelec resorted to ?clustering? for efficient deployment and use of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines used in the country?s first automated presidential elections.

The precinct clustering system?which reduced the voting precincts to 76,300 from 300,000?guaranteed more voters massing on each polling center.

In urban areas, the maximum of voters per one clustered precinct was 1,000; in rural areas, about 400-750.

Because the automated balloting was vastly different from the manual polling in the past, the Comelec had issued a plan for the layout of the voting precincts and directives for crowd management.

Under the plan, there would be 10-20 seats inside a polling precinct, with two to three lines for verification.

Aside from the three-member board of election inspectors (BEI), support staff should help in establishing the voters? identity.

Flash point

The Department of Education (DepEd) district supervisor was assigned to manage the crowds outside the precincts.

Poll officials said there were reports that the 20 seats were not utilized. Many precincts only had one long queue. Many voters who saw the snaking lines under the sizzling sun just gave up and left.

Beduya had warned that the first three hours of the voting could be a flash point. He had urged the Comelec to increase staff on the ground to assist the BEIs and conduct training on crowd management.

Rethink policy

Tim Diaz de Rivera, a member of the Comelec?s technical evaluation committee, conceded that the BEIs were trained insufficiently to handle big crowds that were generated by the clustered precincts.

DepEd Assistant Secretary Jonathan Malaya said the Comelec should rethink its clustering policy and add more PCOS machines next time.

?Technically speaking, people who went home because of the long lines were already disenfranchised,? he said.

?One complaint we receive is crowd control because, for the first time, we had 1,000 voters voting in each cluster. They really poured into our schools,? Malaya said.

Undermanned

?We had schools which had 24 clustered precincts or 16 clustered precincts. This meant 16,000 trooped to those schools. So, you can just imagine the sheer number of people in some areas,? he said.

Education Undersecretary Franklin Sunga said that each precinct was manned by only six people?the three BEI members, two support staff, and one election supervisor.

?We had reports that our teachers had to ask for help from the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting and the police to control the people at the gates,? Malaya said.

?We call on the public not to blame our teachers. Some of them have been at their posts since Sunday,? Sunga said. ?Teachers were being harassed and threatened.?