Blogging and the Canadian Election
In the past couple of days, there has been growing discussions within the Canadian blogosphere about how and/if blogs will be able to “report” on results of today's federal election. Several people (Alan Gahtan, Andrew Coyne, Rob Hyndman) have focused on Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act that does not permit the transmission of election results prior to the close of all polling stations. Does this means, bloggers can't post until all the polls close? What about posts by foreign bloggers? As Alan Gahtan points out, Section 330 seems to imply that “broadcasting stations” outside Canada can't attempt to influence person to vote or refrain from voting, while Section 331 talks about “non-interference by foreigners”. I wonder how much energy/time Elections Canada will spend tonight monitoring the blogosphere. If there is a plan to keep an eye on what's happening, I sure hope they have a kick-ass RSS reader!
Update: CBC.ca provides a good primer on how it will cover the election to comply with Election Canada rules.
January 23rd, 2006 at 1:16 pm
I'm not a specialist of the law, but if Elections Canada holds the results until 9:30pm, I can't see how bloggers will be able to post results before except if they are working at Elections Canada. In that particular case, it should be possible to monitor what's going out of their headquarter.
Even if they work in a voting office, they would only have partial/non-significant results. Not really interesting.
Pierre
http://www.pierrelambert.com
January 23rd, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Looks like CBC.ca is playing by the Elections Act rules:
http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/why10.html
Mike.