I thought I should post an update on the ongoing issues with http://www.voterpower.org.uk/ I stumbled across on Friday my original plan for that post was to lightly touch on electoral reform by showing how a system already in use in some elections in this country could be used for Westminster elections. This is a hugely complex set of topics which I am unlikely to be able to cover in sufficient depth on this blog but I thought the concepts were worth mentioning.
Voter Power was launched with quite a bit of publicity and seemed a good way of highlighting alternative voting systems online, especially in comparison with the original report document which understandably lacks mass market appeal. It was therefore a huge disappointment that it had obvious glaring errors. It had just been something subtle like rounding errors in the numbers or a fault with the visualisations then that wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but the site is currently peddling serious misinformation. The fact that the fault in the data shows on the front page in the two prominent lists of top and bottom ten show that the quality control standards here don’t seem to include having a quick glance over the results let alone a full test suite.
Why is this an issue? This is the so called Internet Election, where social media and networking, blogs and mashups are as important to getting information out as door-stepping and leaflets. The power is there for everyone to be able to put forward their view of the country and how it should be run and provide visualisations on how this compares with reality and the viewpoints of candidates. This sort of increase in information and comparison tools is, in my opinion, a hugely valuable way of increasing engagement and hopefully turn out, so high profile errors like this set the whole process back as they undermine trust,
Martin has been in touch but is away for the weekend so can’t look at the issues that are marring the site until he gets back.
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