Possible worst-case scenarios that could happen this May 2010 Philippine elections

The overhyped 2010 Philippine national elections are drawing nearer. It’s probably the most overhyped election ever in the Philippine democratic history, because, for the first time ever, the country will now rely on optical scanning machines to tally the ballots, because we’ve lost all our faith on our counting skills. A Chinese baby could count these votes better than a hundred Filipino mathematicians and in turn give us more appropriate leaders.

 

Even better.

But we shouldn’t lose our faith in machines. They’re machines, right? Powerful, emotionless beings that do what they are supposed to do, unless something goes wrong or some dick decides to mess up its work. But even with this ancient technology hitting the Philippine’s election shelves in a few days, there are still relatively good chances of bad scenarios occurring this election season, scenarios like…

Discontinuation of automated tallying'

Despite all the hype and assurances that nothing would go wrong with machines taking over the whole “counting up the votes” thing with the elections, many people, particularly those who are looking to get a little upper hand in the elections through giving everyone the finger and kicking them in the balls, are still against it. They disagree with letting robots count our valuable, valuable votes. For them, a manual counting is needed.
They already signed a manifesto (fancy name for an actually serious petition). However, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) already trashed the idea of having a manual count alongside the machines, calling it “highly unnecessary and would require accountants and mathematicians high on crack to perform”.

Why this would happen

Obviously, the Philippines relied on optical scanning machines primarily for one reason: to avoid mistakes in counting and to negate the possibility of people cheating the tallying of votes. When people ask to have the dirty, inaccurate, and easily-hackable method of counting back, you can only think of one reason why they would think of such an idea.
They just wanted to cheat the elections, yet again.

Election Rioting

The machines can be impervious to hacking, provided that the hackers the dirty-minded politicians hire couldn’t even be competent enough to keep viruses off their computers. So what would be the solution to this?
They would have to resort to the old-time age of vote diverting: beating the shit out of everything.
And they don’t have to hire a team of thugs, either. They could just hire one guy with a death wish to falsely announce a bomb threat while he’s in line to vote, or just say that the elections are rigged. People would go instantly nuts and grab their pitchforks and torches, where they’ll engage in a free-for-all 9,000,000+ man MMA-style deathmatch.
The Philippine society would collapse in the course of a few days.

Why this would happen

This is the election equivalent of nuking another country because they just won’t quit or their defenses are just too impervious to any sort of penetration (dick joke there, sort of). If you can’t beat them, might as well nuke them, they say.

Hell yeah!

Another People Power

This one is quite similar to the previous one above, but much, much less violent. “People Power” is the process of brainwashing the people with special false propaganda to precisely get them to riot, without the violence part, that is.

Why this would happen

How people start People Power Revolutions.

A peaceful rendition of the previous two stated above would be more acceptable to the world, and probably let a few tears stream from the eyes of the people outside the country. It would raise the particular person who called “hacks” status into a hero, and probably his whole family as a whole, and set of a chain reaction where members of his family would step up as leaders and mess the whole scenario even worse.
But I doubt if someone has the balls to do it. You have to kill yourself and falsely tell the world somebody did it, then get somebody close to you (preferably one of your parents) to take your position for you. The rest would be history.
The world has seen enough People Power Revolutions. The next one would be oh-so-boring, unacceptable, and more repetitive than the plots of Philippine soap operas.