THE overwhelming interest in party-list seats in the Lower House, evidenced by 270 aspirants who registered as candidates, piqued my interest into finding out statistics available on party-lists. I could not find ny single source which could give me how many seats were at stake, how candidates fared in previous elections, and what it would take in terms of number of votes to be a winner. I surmised that it must be lucrative enough to justify throwing one's hat into the ring without bothering about any of the details as I did.

It was at this point when I was asked by a party-list nominee what the magic number might be for the coming election. Dumbfounded to give a better than 'guesstimate' answer, I set about assembling the historical and current datum which one would have to study in arriving at a defensible number. Furthermore, I had to design the algorithm which one had to use to define the inter-relationship of each part of the information that would go into the financial model.