(This is a guest post from Jake Ramos of Bruised Leaf)

An opinion piece I critiqued yesterday had me thinking when the author said that the Comelec may have made “the mother of all bad deals.” This was told in the context of the poll body spending about Php 11 billion to run this year's automated elections without necessarily owning the vote-counting machines.

The Comelec will have much lower spending in future polls, with several billions in savings compared to this year, if it agrees to buy the 76,000 machines used last May according to Smartmatic's president for Asia Pacific Cesar Flores.

The author of the opinion piece seemed under the impression that the Comelec agreed to be charged too much this year because the same technology could be used in future elections and yet cost a lot less. Since we're not privy to how exactly Smartmatic would conduct the same magnitude of a project but charge several billions less, let's just entertain the idea of Comelec actually purchasing the machines, partly because it's the rational thing for it to do.

Even more rational is getting the machines to serve other purposes. Consider it maximizing the utility derived from the expenditure. What else could we use those machines for?

Well, in-between elections, possibly sooner than the next one even, the PCOS machines could be instrumental in the conduct of a plebiscite for a People's Initiative. Filipinos could have a real chance at improving on the 1987 Philippine Constitution's provisions to suit the country's needs.

Automation that works, with systems and processes that have been found to work as well last May, plus improvement tweaks of course for better efficiency, could prove to be the clean, legitimate way to run a plebiscite where any and all proposed amendments to the Constitution will be approved or rejected by the people through voting. Amendments that are approved will be ratified within a much shorter time thanks to the automated count, and the results will be verifiable.

If we Filipinos want to bring about change like for example, boosting economy by getting more foreign investors to bring millions of jobs here, or the holding of public officials accountable via a Freedom Of Information law, a plebiscite for a People's Initiative using the Smartmatic technology we've already used looks like the way to go.

It will be a level playing field, the way to really participate in a democratic process, where even the naysayers of Charter Change could easily vote “no” to any proposed amendment that smacks of term extension. Who knows, maybe truly worthwhile legislation will have a real chance of being passed into law, now that we have this technology. That will have made the investment in the PCOS machines definitely worth it.