News said last week..."P11,000,000,000.00 has been approved for election automation".
Lotsa-money...argh!

That amount is to ease counting of casted votes for president, vice president, senators, congressmen, maybe Mayors, etc.

That amount will be spent by the national government for approximately 40,000,000 voters.

That amount does not include the candidates' allocation for the campaign.

That should stir up the economy, huh?!?!? But, would it serve its purpose?
Or...is there a less expensive way?

Over coffee, a good friend and I were joking...

Why not just use "texting" to vote?
Send to 2366...or 367...
Allocate enough money for a file server...IBM, maybe...or Sun....
Or even just pay the telecomm operators...say P20 per vote sent (that would be 10 times more expensive than regular text, huh???...)

Then, maybe ask every voter to re-register...and upon registration, the voter will be given a SIM Card...that's about P30 per SIM...including free text, huh????!!!!

There would be a lot more details, of course....but the thing is....the infrastructure is already built to send and receive the votes....and we don't need too much of "educating" the voters...almost anyone knows how to use the cellphones...even elementary students....that should save a lot of money.

Then how can voting thru text warrant that "cheating" is avoided?

...but then again...how was cheating avoided when elections were manually conducted? and how would spending P11 billion help?

Text-text na lang!!!!!!
di ba?!?!?!?

As I mentioned...these are just jokes shared between me and a friend...
he he he he ! ! ! ! !