These photos of poll clerks manually counting the votes in the various precincts at

at a public school in the Payatas district at the back of the Batasan compound drive

home the point that we must computerize the process before the next elections.

It is a waste of much time to do the counting manually when a low-cost computerized

system -- as proposed by a Filipino IT company  and at a fraction of the billion-

peso illegal contract of the Comelec with a Korean company -- can easily do the job.

The head poll clerk would get a ballot, shout aloud the results item by item for a clerk

to tabulate on a big tally sheet pinned on the blackboard, another clerk also tabulating

it on the official tally sheets, and others copying the running tallies on their own sheets.

Then when every ballot has been counter, the totals would be made.

It is a process made to order for a computerized system. If the COMELEC had not

bungled the job of setting up the computerized system, each precinct of about 200-400

voters in this particular school could have the job done not in several hours but in just

a minute per ballot at the most.