A View on View :: Blogging and the Canadian Election

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Blogging and the Canadian Election

by Mark Evans on Mon 23 Jan 2006 11:31 AM EST | Permanent Link

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.

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Re: Blogging and the Canadian Election

by Anonymous on Mon 23 Jan 2006 01:16 PM EST | Permanent Link

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
www.pierrelambert.com

Re: Blogging and the Canadian Election

by GMapsMania on Mon 23 Jan 2006 02:00 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Looks like CBC.ca is playing by the Elections Act rules:

http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/why10.html

Mike.

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\n"; return $new_ad_params; } } /** BEGIN Backwards Compatibility Routines */ if (! function_exists('array_combine')) { function array_combine($keys, $values) { foreach($keys as $key) $out[$key] = array_shift($values); return $out; } } if (!function_exists('fputcsv')) { function fputcsv($filePointer, $dataArray, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { // Write a line to a file // $filePointer = the file resource to write to // $dataArray = the data to write out // $delimeter = the field separator // Build the string $string = ""; // No leading delimiter $writeDelimiter = FALSE; foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) { // Replaces a double quote with two double quotes $dataElement=str_replace("\"", "\"\"", $dataElement); // Adds a delimiter before each field (except the first) if($writeDelimiter) $string .= $delimiter; // Encloses each field with $enclosure and adds it to the string $string .= $enclosure . $dataElement . $enclosure; // Delimiters are used every time except the first. $writeDelimiter = TRUE; } // end foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) // Append new line $string .= "\n"; // Write the string to the file return fwrite($filePointer,$string); } } if (!function_exists('fgetcsv')) { #TODO - Remove or ??? #Originally built to handle PHP4 style of fgetcsv $CSVstruct = array('Sep' => ','); function fgetcsv($handle, $length=1024, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { $rows = ParseCSVStream(fgets($handle),"\n",false); return $rows[0]; } } // append a CSV row containing data converted from source array $data. Actual conversion is done by ExCSVRowWalker() function AppendCSVRow($data) { global $CSVstruct; array_walk($data,'ExCSVRowWalker'.($CSVstruct['OutEOL']=="\n"?'N':'')); $CSVstruct['File'] .= implode($CSVstruct['Sep'],$data).$CSVstruct['OutEOL']; } // returns an array of rows (each row being an array of columns) with parsed data. Returns false when conversion fails. Auto-detects Win/Mac/*nix newline characters, which are converted all to the sequence specified (defaults to $CSVstruct['OutEOL']) for your convenience. function ParseCSVStream($data, $newline="\n", $associative=true) { global $CSVstruct; $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\r","\n",str_replace("\r\n","\n",$data)); if ($newline!="\n") $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\n",$newline,$CSVstruct['File']); $CSVstruct['OutEOL'] = $newline; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = 0; $CSVstruct['Error'] = false; $CSVstruct['EOF'] = false; $res = array(); if ($associative) { $titles = ParseCSVRow(); while (($row = ParseCSVRow())!==false) { $newa = array(); //possible optimization: might use array_combine() - requires PHP 5 for ($col = 0; $col0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',str_replace($CSVstruct['OutEOL'],"\n",$item)).'"'; } function ExCSVRowWalkerN(&$item) { if (!is_numeric($item)&&(strlen($item)>0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',$item).'"'; } // read next line from buffer. function RowInput() { global $CSVstruct; if ($CSVstruct['EOF']) { return ""; } else { $pos = strpos($CSVstruct['File'], $CSVstruct['OutEOL'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); if ($pos===false) { $CSVstruct['EOF'] = true; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); } else { $pos1 = $CSVstruct['Seek']; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = $pos+1; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$pos1,$pos-$pos1); }; }; } /** Initialize ad_network variable */ $ad_logic = new ad_logic($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); $ad_network = $ad_logic->ad_network($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); ?>