Election-Campaign Law

In Case You Ever Wondered?..

By Thad Hall

…people around the world are as psychotic about knowing the results of the election 5 minutes after the polls close as they are in America. In Estonia last night, the National Electoral Committee’s website froze for over an hour and, of course, that is the talk of the election today. The interesting part was that the Electoral Committee used Twitter and Facebook to get election results out and, in the course of an hour, more than 3,000 people “friended” the Electoral Committee so that they would get the stream of election results. Sometimes, social media is a great backup plan!

Also, one nice thing about the huge rise in early and Internet voting in Estonia — almost half of the voters used those methods — is that vote results were known earlier than ever before because the precinct counts were that much easier, with fewer election day ballots to count at the polls.

Full post as published by Election Updates on March 07, 2011 (boomark / email).