The headlines for today’s Inquirer is about how the number of seats for Party List representatives in Congress will be increased to 55 for the upcoming 2010 elections. This made me think a long while, which led me to do some number crunching and research. In the 2007 Party List elections, all you needed was around 300,000+ votes to be able to get a seat in Congress. If that’s the case, then one valid strategy to win a seat in Congress would be to invest heavily in Digital Marketing, especially in Social Media.
According to the various studies on the number of Philippines Internet Users, we’re looking at roughly 24,000,000 – 26,000,000 online Filipinos by 2010. Let’s say for the purpose of discussion that half of those are in voting age. That’s around 12,500,000 potential votes. Unlike normal seats in the Congress, anyone anywhere in the Philippines can vote for your Party List. We’re not talking about a district, city, or province – it’s the national electorate.
If you only need, let’s say 400,000 votes, then you only need 3% of the 12.5M online Filipinos to write the name of your Party List come election day.
This would make even more sense if the Party List group you’re trying to form is related to Information Technology because then it would have more relevance to the online community. The only problem here would be to get COMELEC to actually approve of your group’s participation in the 2010 elections.
For those Party Lists that are not related at all to Information Technology, they can still tap the internet by identifying communities that share the same vision and build a relationship with them. In the absence of existing communities, then maybe it falls on the shoulders of the Party List group to make one online.
partylist result election 2010