Philippine poll officers might continue to count votes by hand in next year's national election as the plan to automate the country's polls for the first time now faces cancellation after a local company backed out from providing technical support, local media reported Tuesday.

Filipino technology company Total Information Management Corp. (TIM) on Monday withdrew from its joint venture with Netherlands-based Smartmatic Corp. to supply the Commission on Election (Comelec) with counting machines, leaving it with little options but to abandon the long-awaited poll automated process and raising the public fear over poll manipulation.

The automation can shorten the counting process from weeks to merely two days.

The poll body awarded the automation contract to the TIM-Smartmatic joint venture earlier this month. The company did not publicly explain the reasons but sources said "irreconcilable differences" inside the consortium led to TIM's withdrawal.

"We will do everything to sanction them. You are not supposed to join a bidding and after you won, you withdraw," Comelec chairman Jose Melo was quoted by the Philippine Star as saying.

Under the bidding law, Smartmatic cannot replace TIM as its Filipino counterpart since they are the ones awarded with the project, the report said. A deadline to settle the legal dispute is set as July 10.

Melo said the likelihood of conducting the 2010 local and national polls manually is greater now.

About 50 million Filipinos are expected to cast their votes for top national and local government posts and nearly 300 seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Source: Xinhua