It seems that ABS-CBN has something on its sleeves for its upcoming coverage of the 2007 Philippine elections.

Earlier today, I saw an teaser advertisement about “Boto Ko, Text Ko” (My Vote, My Text), with the usual Halalan (Elections) logo that the network uses in its election coverages. The logo of their technical partner, STI, was also shown.

Usually, TV networks do a quick count of sorts after the voting period. Basically the school partner provides the manpower and technology in handling the quick count; the network only has to present the results. The process is really simple: student volunteers monitor the counting at the precints, and sends the data to a data center. You might had noticed that as early as seven in the evening (or earlier), the networks had reported partial results already; that was because the volunteers were required to submit partial results by the hour (sometimes even every 30 minutes).

And now, this. I think what they want to do is to ask voters to text whoever they have voted. This will probably be more unofficial than the unofficial quickcount, as the votes via text cannot be verified (unless they have the technology to do so). However, remember that the National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) had attempted to do its quickcount via SMS in 2004, which failed miserably. ABS-CBN will probably ask the voters to text the candidates that they have elected for senators only (in contrast, Namfrel had tried to collect the results for all positions at stake at that year).

Whether this project will work or not remains to be seen. Please note that this is just speculation at this point.

NOTE: This post is also posted at The Geeky Guide to Nearly Everything, a blog being led by Rocky, an old friend from LiveJournal. I will be contributing to the Geeky Guide at least once a week.