Vote early, vote often (revisited)

Over the summer VOCM, to its credit, amended the code for its popular Question of the Day feature to make it a little bit harder to torque the results.

Harder. But not impossible. The August 10th question was “Do you agree with government's decision to appeal the court ruling over the highway depots?” As with past questions dealing with the performance of Danny Williams-Government, there was a surge in “voting” on this question, with 4756 “votes” cast. This is the highest number since the new verification-word voting was implemented on June 29th.


Entirely unsurprisingly, 71% of this entirely-spontaneous expression of the popular will agreed with the course that Danny Williams-Government is taking.

The last question to get more “votes” [caveat: data is no longer available for QoD between April 24th and June 28th, inclusive] was under the old, control-free system. On April 23rd, VOCM asked, “Should the Chief Electoral Officer investigate the 2001 St. Barbe by-election?”

A total of 31,476 “votes” were cast, the 11th-highest “turnout” of all time. Of those, 63% toed the Williams-Reynolds line, and said no.