For anyone who follows me on twitter, you know that one of the things I am most passionate about is the fight to stop online voting. Today I am not here to go through the reasons again – the information is out there, between MIT, the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and other sources, there is much understanding of attacks, cryptography, and information security. However, I am here to comment on the decision yesterday by Edmonton’s City Council.

To the dismay of my cubicle buddies, I listened to the entire livestream of the Council Chambers. It was clear that most of the Councillors did not fully understand the technical elements of potential breaches, but had taken the time to talk to IT professionals who do. It was also clear that they had major reservations about the possibility of coercion of the vote, when not behind the safety of the screen in a polling station.

Now, due to my stance on the issue, I have been called everything from a fear-mongerer to a scam artist. I have been told that I am a threat to democracy, and that Edmonton’s City Council demonstrated a complete lack of leadership. On the other hand, this is [...]Read More

October 2013: Municipalities across Alberta will engage in civic elections, a process that until now was repeated every three years, although moving to four year terms hereinafter.

Every time I hear some politician talk about bringing social media into elections, I have to giggle a bit. The fact is, #yycvote, and its counterparts including #yegvote and #voteTO, were very active in 2010. Here’s a bit of a review of 2010, and what might be expected as social media becomes even more entrenched in our democratic process.

The Twitter

Between July 25, 2010 and October 19, 2010, 72,905 tweets were made with either the #yycvote or #yycvotes hashtags. 45,000 of those were original content, with another 27,000 RTs (or retweets – for those who aren’t familiar with twitter, it’s effectively copying content but acknowledging original poster(s)). Over 5,000 of those were between 9:00pm and 11:00pm on election night, as the count was coming in.

Over 4,000 unique individuals were talking about the election over twitter. This doesn’t seem like much – 0.4% of Calgary’s population, but it was active and though-provoking for those in there. Well, at least for awhile. We’ll get to that.

The number of tweets generally kept pace [...]Read More

The electoral writ has dropped in Alberta. We will go to the polls on April 23rd.

Hi folks. We’re back soon. We promise. Well, that’s assuming something of electoral interest happens in the coming days. You haven’t heard anything like that, have you? Maybe we’re just hearing things.

We’ll be back for the provincial election, letting you know the details of the ridings in Calgary. Stay tuned.

I don’t call a lot of people, “friend.”  The list of people who I consider to be friends is minimal, at best, and even then, the people who I would entrust most information to is an even smaller list.  Jason Letourneau was one of those friends.  His sudden passing on Tuesday hit me hard, as it has anyone who has had the privilege of calling him a friend.

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Jason Scott Letourneau. Jason was born with a major heart defect and through the generous donation of an anonymous family, Jason received the priceless gift of a new heart 18 years ago. Although 40 years of age, Jason thought of himself as just turning “18″ – old enough to vote. Jason worked hard to support those going through any type of hardship. He had been a spokesperson for the Organ Donation and Transplant Association of Canada and helped others whenever possible. He worked for various charitable institutions and had a passion for fund raising. Jason really believed you can make a difference and recently discovered a new passion working at Calgary City Hall which fed his love for communication and public [...]Read More

If you didn’t get a chance to hear the Joey versus Shane debate on CBC on Monday, here’s a link so you can listen to the audio.

http://www.cbc.ca/homestretch/episode/2011/09/19/pc-bloggers/

People in favour of tweeting the results called a victory last night.  A civil disobedience movement that really sticks it to the country’s election broadcast laws.

Of course, don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.  Last night’s trending was aided, in large part, by the disobedience to the civil disobedience.  That is, the humourous posts that seemed to be going on all night.  Between spoilers to movies, books, and historical events, #tweettheresults was then picked up worldwide and, like many trending memes on TeH InterwebZ, was then followed.  At times, it was actually difficult to find the results among the multitude of tweets that made fun of the whole event.

The most re-tweeted, of course, was one that said Cons █████████ Libs ████████, etc., both a mockery of the whole thing and of the redacted access to information requests that happen with government.

In the end, though, last night was a flurry of twitter activity.  While its use in Calgary was sporadic, at best, with exception to a few specific candidates, it’s obvious that the power of twitter in a toe-the-party-line system is not necessarily the civil discourse that happens with politicians so much as the information [...]Read More

Worldwide timezones were introduced by a number of individuals, (see wikipedia), including Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming.  As you are well aware, this enables Albertans to watch House, M.D. at an earlier time as it plays in an Eastern time zone, and enabled us in university to watch CSI at midnight (when I lived in Ontario) because it played later in B.C.

Of course, it has this other impact during elections… poll times.  And, if you hadn’t heard, section 329 of the Elections Act of Canada prohibits transmission of election results prior to all polls closing.  This means that, even if the polls are counted in the Atlantic, they cannot be transmitted until the polls are closed in B.C.

A number of social media aficionados are calling for a #tweettheresults campaign, a civil disobedience run to defy this seemingly antiquated law that cannot possibly be enforced over TeH InterwebZ.

While I think it’s important to call to attention the law and its to-be-futile attempt at containing the results, I think responsible Canadians need to look past the law itself and look at why this exists.

While we have a general idea of how different areas will vote, due to the [...]Read More

Today I read an article by Michael Taube, former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, entitled, “Vote Mob Mentality”

It reminded me a lot of comments made by a particular political scientist in Calgary during the civic election.  So much, so, that it has made me want to comment on this.

I’ll be honest – I see a vote mob as even less possible to translate into large votes as twitter, but of course, I’m no longer in the carefree days of University, and thus… old.  Maybe not very old, but I’m out of the loop on this one, so I would be fooling myself if I said that I knew how the mentality worked and that it would or would not translate into votes.

This particular line caught my attention, “I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these participants stayed home on May 2.”  Wow. I mean, replace May 2 with October 14, and you would have the civic commentary on twitter before the political scientists, in the know, knew what hit them. (By the way, I have it on good authority that the particular person I am thinking of now has more respect for social media in [...]Read More

For those who watched CalgaryPolitics.com closely during the civic election, you may have seen a debate series we ran over Twitter, which we lovingly called, “Twibates.”  We ran a twibate for mayoralty candidates, two twibates for aldermanic (even- and odd-numbered wards), and then a final for trustees.

Similar debates were either held, or considered, in other parts of the province and country, and even got some attention by a few in-the-know social media people in the United States.  A few days ago, someone asked me whether or not we were going to run any for the Federal election, and that started a discussion with CalgaryPolitics folk.

Unlike a civic election, provincial and federal have party mandates.  It would be highly likely that, in such a twibate, we would not see individuals from certain parties, or just the same talking points from candidate after candidate after candidate from the same party.  Not very conducive to the best forum format.  We also considered having representatives from parties, but that does not seem very open, nor is it good for anyone who considers the vote for the individual more important than the vote for the party logo.

So, what we are considering (and [...]Read More

Recount was called because “there were more votes cast than ballots sent to the polling station.”

Upon recount, it was determined that some groups of “50″ ballots were in groups of smaller numbers – 35.  So, it turnout out there was not the initial fear of more votes than ballots, and due to this, vote counts were changed slightly for each candidate.  However, it is not enough to turn the election.

The good news is, it does not look like electoral fraud happened.

Update/Editorial: I am curious what this means for the rest of it. I mean, if this counting problem existed here, could this have happened elsewhere?  What controls are in place for this part of the counting process?