I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
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Google have a massive initiative in place for the Australian elections.
http://www.google.com.au/election2007
This is fascinating as they are aggregating a bunch of content and have interesting ‘worm-like’ graphs of political searches. Will be interesting to see how these map to the final votes.
How easy would it be for them to add a ‘vote now’ button!
We’ve been waiting for years for the electoral authorities to start leveraging technology but perhaps it will be lead from the outside in, rather than inside out.
This is a big step forward into our lives from Google though. Very, very interesting.
blog
While I agree that technology could really speed up counting votes etc on election nights, I think there are some very valid reasons why it’s not currently done this way. There are still many New Zealanders out there who don’t know how to use a computer, let alone own one. These people are *generally* older and *generally* have less money than those who *do* own (and know how to use) a computer. Introducing electronic voting would probably reduce the chances of these types of people voting, which would in turn influence the result of the election (more rich people with computers able to vote?). Of course the same logic can be used to critique the current system…not everyone can read and understand a voting form, and not everyone has the means to physically get to a polling booth. Maybe electronic voting is the way to go after all!
FYI: There are a number of easter eggs on the maps left by google engineers, eg. John Howard playing frisbee on bondi beach.
More info at
http://benbalbo.com/2007/11/09/howard-and-rudd-get-on-just-fine
Google has so many services and applications now, it is sometimes hard to see how they all fit together. This is an excellent example of what they can achieve from from their platform.