Okay, okay don’t get too excited. The title of the post is just an idea I got from this story from PC Magazine on how XBOX 360′s are being used in the United States to get first-time voters, especially the youth to register as voters. All this in preparation for the upcoming November Presidential elections this year.

the youth-centric political advocacy group will enable Xbox 360 owners to have their voices heard on an exclusive forum, participate in election-predicting polls, and, yes, register to vote through their 360. Rock the Vote’s public service announcement videos will also be made available on the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Could the same idea also work here in the Philippines? Like tapping Friendster, Multiply.com and popular MMORPG or even LAN games to get the Pinoy youth the register as voters.

With the next Presidential elections less than two years away, this is a very attractive idea because one, the Philippine population is quite young, second, the youth make up a significant portion of the population, third, the youth are stigmatized as apathetic to such issues like elections, politics and being active in community and national life, fourth, as a consequence, they are spending much more of their time on other endeavors like social networking, online gaming, going to malls and basically living a care-free life.

Plus, from my own personal experience, getting the youth to register as voters is no easy feat. They’d rather do something else than to drag their arses to the local COMELEC, queue in line for almost the whole day just to get registered. So if ever this idea would become reality, the local COMELEC could select a well-known internet shop as an accredited voter registration center. I’m sure the tech-savvy and DOTA-addicted Pinoy youths wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes to register as voters before getting their game on or stalking their crushes via social-networking sites.

Reality check though, this idea will, probably remain an idea because at present, Philippine elections are still in a state of chaos, there is persistent talk that Filipinos are starting to loose faith in the ballot as a means of achieving some good for the country.

We can’t even properly modernize our election systems like computerized elections or automated polls, how could we expect to conduct online voter’s registration?

However, I remain hopefull that someday this would become reality.

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