Canada has a federal election next week. Please vote.
If you live in Eastern Canada, your vote may be counted before our polls out west close. The local media in Fredericton and Lavalle and Ottawa will report on the early returns.
Section 329 of Canada’s election laws will, in theory, prevent those results from drifting westward before 8:00 pm PST. Here it is:
No person shall transmit the result or purported result of the vote in an electoral district to the public in another electoral district before the close of all of the polling stations in that other electoral district.
The law is designed to prevent eastern results from influencing western voters. It made sense in an era of few communications channels, before the 24-hours news cycle, before TV and when there were only dozens of radio stations across the country. In 2011, in the age of the Internet, Canada has millions of broadcast channels. More than half the country has a Facebook account, and there are millions of Canadians on Twitter.
Section 329 has clearly become obsolete, unfeasible and unenforceable. We can’t ask 10 million easterners on social networks to keep secrets from five million westerners. It’s just not going to happen.
Tweeting the results
Alexandra Samuel and I were talking about this last week, and how Section 329 is a twentieth century law for a twenty-first century issue. We put our heads together, and came up with Tweet the Results (Alex did most of the work–she writes about it here).
It’s a small act of civil disobedience, demonstrating that Section 329 is untenable, and encouraging lawmakers to reform it. All the site does is aggregate tweets with the hash tag #tweetheresults. It replicates functionality that’s native to Twitter.
A good, bad or impractical law?
In response to our little site, some people have suggested that social media users “respect the spirit of the law”. I’m more interested in emphasizing the impracticality of Section 329 than debating its underlying ethics.
That said, the argument for it seems pretty philosophical. According to journalist Paula Simons, there’s no evidence that voting patterns would change. In 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada considered a case where a Vancouver blogger published election results from Atlantic Canada. In her dissent of the 5-4 decision which upheld the blogger’s conviction, Justice Rosalie Abella wrote:
“There is only speculative and unpersuasive evidence to support the government’s claim that the information imbalance is of sufficient harm to voter behaviour or perceptions of electoral unfairness that it outweighs any damage done to a fundamental and constitutionally protected right.”
It’s also worth noting that other big democracies–the US, Australia and Russia–have no such blackout rule in place.
Law professor Michael Geist points out that enforcing the law would require banning access to Facebook and Twitter on election night:
Given the current popularity of social media tools that did not exist at the time, a similar ban today is simply not possible without inflicting enormous harm to freedom of expression and public confidence in the election system.
Finally, there’s a simple solution to the results blackout: Elections Canada should simply delay publicizing any results anywhere in the country until polls have closed in British Columbia. Democracy can wait three hours.
I genuinely don’t care if anybody actually tweets or post to Facebook about election results on May 2. I do care about changing this silly law to one that works for this century.
What do you think? Are you going to stay off Twitter and Facebook on election night to avoid hearing the results?
As you’ve probably heard, our federal government has gone a bit mad. If nothing else, this political crisis has taught an unsuspecting nation the meaning of the word prorogation.
I really don’t know what to think on this one.
There seems to be plenty of blame to spread around. Prime Minister Harper seemed pretty eager to goad the opposition with inaction on a stimulus package and the elimination of political subsidies (now off the table). The opposition seem all to keen to exploit this apparent misstep for all it’s worth. And poor, nerdy Elizabeth May is still trying to get a seat at the table.
What’s Best For Canadians?
It’s a simple question to ask, but I can’t answer it. Who are the better guides through murky economic waters? The Conservatives or a coalition? What kind of economic stimulus package (in your pants–sorry, just needed to get that out of the way) does the country need? And should we really bail out the auto industry? I’m philosophically opposed to such bailouts, but that’s a pretty unthinking response.
And then there are the ins and outs of parliamentary procedure. I’m pretty ambivalent about the whole mandate issue. Everybody in the House of Commons has a mandate. Prime Minister Harper’s high ground looks no taller than a pitcher’s mound when you consider his minority position and the fact that his party only received 38% of the popular vote.
Several of my left-leaning colleagues have invited me sign petitions or join Facebook groups supporting the coalition of the Liberals, NDP (doesn’t Mr. Layton look like an eager spaniel these days?) and the Bloc. I won’t blindly do so just because I voted Green in the last election. It seems a little petty, particularly when there are parliamentary processes in place for the parties to resolve matters, one way or another.
I’m not usually a fence-sitter. I’d like to hear the summarized professional opinions of about fifty economists regarding what Canada needs to weather the economic downturn. That might clarify what I think the country needs.
Well, some of my faith in the US is restored this morning. Senator Obama’s election to the White House is an extraordinary gesture of hope that ought to resonate around the globe. His acceptance speech was yet another example of awesome oratory. Let us hope that President Obama governs the way Senator Obama campaigned.
Of course, there were a few disappointments last night. California voted ‘yes’ on proposition 8, effectively banning gay marriage in the state. This exit poll is particularly shocking, indicating that 70% of African-Americans voted ‘yes’ on the issue. I should really learn more about the rationale behind referendums. Why do we (and the US much more than us) have them, and under what circumstances?
Likewise, Alaska probably re-elected an 84-year-old convicted felon (who thinks the Internet is ‘a series of tubes’) to the Senate. He’ll be the first person ever to be re-elected to the Senate after being found guilty on criminal charge. As someone said elsewhere on the web this morning, stay classy, Alaska.
On this historic day in American history, I wanted to reference Sarah’s excellent report from the coincidentally-named town of Obama, Japan:
I spent the past weekend in Obama, and awesome doesn’t even begin to describe how awesome it was.
Obama, a fishing village on the Sea of Japan, has transformed itself into a hotbed of Barack Obama activism. Although, I suspect the people of Obama are rooting for Obama not because they like his politics, but because they like his name.
The charming portrait of Obama featured in the flags and posters that line the town’s main street looks like it was sketched in about five minutes.
I feel like I’m recommending a This American Life episode every other week, but it’s a reflection of how much I enjoy the show. Last week’s episode was called “The Ground War”, and tells several stories from the electoral battles being fought in Pennsylvania:
This American Life goes to Pennsylvania, a battleground within a battleground, to figure out why, and how, John McCain and Barack Obama both think they can win there. And we get to know the ordinary people who’ve become the candidates’ most forceful foot soldiers.
Pennsylvania, I take it, is one of the few states that John Kerry won in the last election that McCain could take this time around. It’s a classic battleground state, described by one Democratic consultant as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between”. It does feel like a metaphor for the entire election, with passionate people on both sides debating the issues and the personalities of the candidates. Simultaneously, we hear from racists and sundry imbeciles from around the state.
One segment profiles volunteers canvassing door-to-door. I’ve never done it, and I’ve always admired people who have the gumption (yes, I said ‘gumption’) to talk to complete strangers about their voting choices.
UPDATE: I meant to mention the swinging cover of Billy Joel’s “Allentown” near the end of the episode. It’s by a German band called Berlin Voices, and feels like an improvement on the original (you can hear a snippet here). They released a whole album of Joel covers. You might want to pass on “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (which you can hear on their MySpace page).
UPDATE #2: Today I read a Slate article about voter registration form. This seems desperately needed in the US. How undemocratic is a process where, in some states, you must register a month before the actual election?
Via Digg and Cracked, here’s the first safe-for-work minute of “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin”. The acting (and setup, and set for that matter) is hilariously awful:
Here’s another PG-rated clip. It features a hot-and-bothered Hillary Clinton uttering the classic line, “I’m so tired of bipartisanship. Why can’t we just be bi?”
The film is produced by Hustler, which, of course, is owned the creepy and politically-active Larry Flynt. Given Mr. Flynt’s leftward leaning, I’d imagine that this production doesn’t, you know, flatter Governor Palin.
These pieces reminded me of this more amusing take on bad porn acting starring Nathan Fillion. Also entirely work-safe.
We were in the US this past long weekend, so we only got news of last night’s election when I logged into the AT&T wifi at SeaTac. To no one’s surprise, we got ourselves another Conservative minority government. I have read just about zero analysis of the results, but it seems to me that most of the parties hopped on the fail boat:
The Liberals, obviously, were the biggest failure. They haven’t won so few seats since 1984. Adieu, Monsieur Dion.
The Conservatives failed to secure a majority.
The Greens failed, yet again, to win a single seat.
Jack Layton failed to become Prime Minister. Though, admittedly, the NDP’s showing was one of its strongest ever.
Personally, I don’t mind minority governments. They feel democratic. And I don’t mind that the average Canadian is asked to pay attention to national issues every couple of years. Is it really that much of a burden to have to vote every 18 months instead of every five years?
UPDATE: Apparently the folks at Comedy Central agree with me.
I’m a big fan of Wordle. Everybody likes pretty tag clouds, but until recently, I’ve had no practical use for the tool.
What with the forthcoming election and all, and being in marketing, I thought it might be interesting to use Wordle to distill each of the four national parties’ websites into a tag cloud. The cloud would reflect the terms that the party uses most frequently on their English-language websites. With an assist from Ask Metafilter, I got them done. I’ll explain a little more about how after the clouds.
As usual, click for larger versions:
What Conclusions Can We Draw?
That’s more a question for you than me, as I haven’t spent much time trying to grok what these clouds tell us (yes, I used ‘grok’). What jumps out at you?
How Did We Make Them?
First, I grabbed a complete copy of each party’s website. I just stuck with HTML files, so if a party hosts a lot of PDFs with unique content, then that’s not reflected. The sites, of course, ended up being different sizes, and I’m relying on my site-copying software, so I can’t be certain I got all the pages.
Then we concatenated each set of HTML files into one gigantic file. Using some scripty-magic, we generated the top 100 or 250 words, each appearing as many times as they appear in the original site.
I went through each of these to clean out most or all of the leftover HTML code, navigational terms like ‘email’ or ‘newsletter’ and French words. The French is why we used 250 words in some cases. For some sites, I downloaded both the French and English version of the site, so I needed to remove the French. By working with a 250 word file, I was able to clean out the French and still have a sizable database of words.
In short, it’s somewhat unscientific, but I’m optimistic that the clouds represent a reasonably fair reflection of each site’s top content. If anyone wants to work with the content I copied, I’m happy to share it. I’m not going to publish the complete sites here, though, as I expect that would constitute a copyright violation.
