No great stretch of the imagination here, just some primitive Rube Goldberg thinkering. The NAMFREL (or whatever independent group) arms its precinct watchers with 3G cellphones, trains them how to access Twitter via mobile and create Twitter accounts using standardized names based on the barangay/municipality/city/province and precinct number (e.g., 239GhillsSJMM). Immediately after their assigned precinct completes the count at the precinct level, the volunteers tweet the tallies of the top 4 presidential and vice-presidential candidates, as well as the top 15 senatorial candidates from their respective precincts. The tweets should be composed via a pre-arranged standard format. Once the tweets have been sent, NAMFREL, as well as the press and the budding Nate Silvers of the Philippines can work out for themselves a tally derived from the most accurate source (the precinct level) that is fairly transparent and can later be compared to the official tally.
I could also see how the individual campaigns can design a similar system in order to protect the votes of their candidates.
No system is perfect. The drawback would come from those localities where there is no working cell signal. Still, I'd be shocked if such areas would comprise more than 20% of the country, and an accurate count from 80% of the country may prove good enough.
This all assumes of course that there will be elections in 2010.
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