ALL politics, in any jurisdiction, is back to the drawing board. We cannot campaign the traditional way simply because of physical distancing, masks and shields, and “no” to huge gatherings. In the United States, it’s now peer-to-peer and the tele-town hall that are driving the gatherings, but very online — another chapter of the e-Campaigning initiated by the Obama campaign circa November 2008.

Congress, with a lead time of two years before May 2022, must be able to scope the landscape: how do you do general registration, how will campaigning be by February 2022 and how would election day be? These are not easy questions for the simple reason that the election body is really in a legacy system that does not understand or chooses not to understand data, systems and analytics. Since 2010, when we started the automated election, not a single chair has reported to Congress on the demographics and psychographics of Filipino voters as an aggregate and as broken down by regions, provinces, cities, municipalities and barangay (villages). They do not even do a 100-percent closedown of an election cycle, ensuring that every vote is reflected in the main tally board. Data on votes are more complete at the local level and it seems that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) en banc will just adopt the norm of previous years with the reasoning that the local Comelec failed to submit a complete report and that those who need data should go to the local level.