By Joyce Pa?ares and Arlie Calalo

AFTER lobbying for years for automated elections, at least 38 members of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines have joined National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales in asking the Commission on Elections to dump the modern but ?very costly? Optical Mark Recognition system in favor of the traditional, manual open system.

The Church leaders shared Gonzales? view that using the optical system ?can endanger the credibility of the 2010 election and can consequently spark a political crisis? because it was not fraud-proof.

Gonzales said his office was making the appeal to the poll body because the credibility of the presidential polls was a national security concern.

?Poll automation experts have already raised their concerns about the vulnerability of the OMR to wholesale fraud, which can be done just by a few computer technicians with or without the connivance of the Comelec or of vendors of the machines,? he said.

The open election system combines manual voting and precinct counting with automated canvassing from the voting center to the national level. The optical system employs automated voting, counting and canvassing from the precinct to the national level.

?I urge the Commission on Elections to reconsider its decision to adopt the much more expensive but not transparent Optical Mark Recognition system,? Gonzales said.

The bishops, in their letter to Comelec chairman Jose Melo, also underscored the ?grave duty of the commission to utilize appropriate methods and technology to safeguard the sanctity of the ballot.?

?We realize that the commission sincerely wants to reform its tarnished image and it hopes to do so through the introduction of the optical mark reader and direct recording electronic systems,? the bishops said.

?We regret, however, that these two technologies seem to be very costly in terms of procurement and storage and do not exactly guarantee fraud-free election results.

?We fear, among others, the fact that OMR and DRE both operate through instantaneous and internal tally of votes, which the electorate cannot manually recheck or validate,? they said.

The Catholic bishops also said that, in contrast to the OMR, the OES ?espouses transparency from voting to the tallying of votes and makes all election data readily available to all groups for their own monitoring purposes.

?We believe that the OES reflects our aspirations for a fraud-free 2010 elections. The fact that the voting and precinct counting are transparent to the voting public makes wholesale cheating extremely difficult to execute,? the bishops said.

They said the OES was also the least costly of the automated election technologies available to the country.