Properly harnessed, new technology can be used to win votes and influence election discourse.

by Alecks P. Pabico

	Katropa.com runs an online and SMS-driven campaign center to help Raul Roco's presidential bid.

FORGET receiving text jokes or sweet messages from now till the end of the canvassing of votes — at least if you're a supporter of presidential candidate Raul Roco. And if Katropa had its way, even those outside the Roco loop would instead be receiving more messages like this right about: "Good day. Join the KATROPA ni Roco Motorcade on Sun, Feb 8 @ 7 am. Assembly @ UP Diliman Oblation, University Ave. Bring ur friends…pls pass, thanks."

With one out of four Filipinos now owning a cell phone — and the ownership cutting across social classes — viral text messages like the one above have become a convenient way for a candidate's supporters to enlist warm bodies in sorties across the country. Katropa, a multisectoral organization running an online campaign center to advance the bid of Roco, the Alyansa ng Pag-asa (Alliance of Hope) bet, is in fact only one among many in the campaign with text brigades. It is, though, perhaps the most relentless in circulating messages via the mobile phone's SMS (short message service) among its members, who are then encouraged to relay these to their own circle of friends and relatives.

Downloadable ring tones and logos, celebrity-texting promos, real-time news updates, and other widely popular wireless services have provided media campaign strategists with models for replication in what is turning out to be a media-dominated campaign. And so while the actual polls looks like they will still be done in a highly manual way, Filipinos may yet witness a high-tech campaign like no other in the country's election history.

The way Alyansa campaign manager Jaime Galvez Tan sees it, this year's elections will be a defining moment for information and communications technologies (ICTs). He singles out the cell phone — or, more precisely, its killer application in SMS — as a vital tool in the current campaign. Just six years ago, when Roco first made a run for the presidency, mobile telephony was not yet as popular. "Even during Edsa II (where text messages were credited for mobilizing the civilian uprising that led to the ouster of Pres. Joseph Estrada), there were less than 10 million cell-phone users," recalls Tan.

Today, close to 22 million Filipinos subscribe to a mobile-phone service. Software allowing communication with cell-phone users are also now available, Tan points out, making the ubiquitous mobile the closest one could get to a killer campaign tool.

Still, it's not the only high-tech device being employed in the current campaign. The decidedly younger voters are making sure the new technologies of their generation are spicing it up, and that means going beyond a popular hand-held gizmo. Indeed, in recent years, the benefits of technology have managed to turn the political exercise less of a throwback from the first-ever held local polls in Bulacan more than a century ago, resulting in campaigns that have become more and more wired.

The Internet has even encouraged online campaigning not just by candidates but also by individuals and organizations wishing to contribute to voter awareness-raising and education. Since the 1998 presidential elections, private citizen-led efforts carrying a strong anti-trapo (traditional politician) sentiment to enlighten voters about their chosen candidates have come and gone. Marvin Bionat's Philippine Update continues to have a section on elections and has recently spawned an online movement called Talsik! (short for its battlecry Tanggalin ang mga Linta, Sagabal, Inutil at Kurakot sa Gobyerno!). A mailing list, Talsik e-group, serves as a venue for advocates of good governance to address and find ways to solve corruption and incompetence in government.

The May 2001 polls, meanwhile, gave birth to election portals like eBantay.com, Vote.ph, Whotovote.com, e-Leksiyon.com, Halalan2001.com, pinoyelections.net. These invariably contained election-related information and databases covering national and local bets.

Today, the profiles, platforms and stands on issues of the presidential, vice-presidential and senatorial candidates are offered by independent sites like Election2004.ph, VoteWisely.com, philelection.com, and the special coverage of the mainstream media, in particular the Philippine Daily Inquirer and GMA Network's Eleksyon 2004 and ABS-CBN's Halalan '04.

	A feature of Election2004.ph allows supporters to donate campaign websites for their candidates for a fee.

Election2004.ph is maintained as a free service by SparrowInteractive.com, a small Filipino-owned web development company. The site has run into a glitch, though. A month into the campaign, visitors to the site were still asking for the data on the candidates. According to site administrator Arnold Gamboa, obtaining the information turned out more difficult than they had anticipated. "We found out that only few of them use the Internet," he says. "So we have to 'manually' get their profiles by meeting with them (or their campaign team)."

Election2004.ph decided to experiment on new features that allow candidates or their campaign team to submit their profiles to the site. Another feature lets supporters donate a campaign website for their candidates complete with a dotcom domain and two email addresses for a one-time fee of P50,000. Presidential candidate Eddie Villanueva, who now has a donated website hosted by Election2004.ph, is even inviting supporters to text his campaign (2950) if they want to volunteer their services.

For the same fee a month, national candidates can also join VoteWisely.com's discussion forums, interact with voters, and have their profiles posted on the website.

Looser in feel and content are the weblogs or blogs written by politics-obsessed netizens who have dedicated their pages to election-related information, either as a news-filtering service or plain self-indulgence. The beauty of some of the election blogs is that they are helping provide a critical appraisal of election issues and are therefore an alternative reading fare to what is found in the media. Among the more interesting reads are entries in weblogs like A Sassy Lawyer in Philippine Suburbia, Crazy Pundit, and Bulletproof Vest: Elections 2004.

Techies, however, say weblogs can also be useful to candidates who need a direct communications channel to get their views across to the voting populace. Because blogs employ a recent technique in RSS (short for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication), a syndication format for sharing headlines and other Web content, news and information from a variety of sources — candidates, political parties, the media, and even fellow bloggers — are easily collated, distributed and made available to users.