OnlineVoting
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The Grammys take voting online at last
Say what you will about the Grammys and its problems, but at least the Recording Academy has been making an effort to catch up with the times. After making streaming-only albums eligible for awards this year (allowing Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book to take Best Rap Album), the academy's next move is to ditch paper votes in favor of online submissions. According to the LA Times, the goal is to make voting more flexible and convenient, and therefore appeal to a broader range of members, including artists who are on the road during the voting period.
Washington to become first US state to enroll voters through Facebook
Washington state has commissioned a Facebook app to provide another avenue for its residents to register to vote. Officials will soon post the software, developed by local company Microsoft, on the Secretary of State's page and allow users to like it in order to spread the word. Once it's ready, residents looking at using it will need to allow Facebook access to their personal info and provide a driver's license number or state ID number, which the social network will use to put them on the voter rolls -- but it would have no access to government databases, according to an election director. The state's current online system already saves up to $2 per voter registration, so on top of getting more out to vote, the new effort should keep even more dollars in the coffers.
Estonians first to cast national votes online
For a lucky group of Eastern European cyber-voters, e-voting no longer entails traveling to an official location to poke at a screen -- let's just hope they managed to shake off e-voting's penchant for fraud while they were at it. Nationwide voting in cyberspace has finally become a reality in, of all places, Estonia. Eeeh? Yep. Estonia's been keen on the idea of voting via the internet since 2001 and became the first country in the world to hold legit general elections when they implemented the remote e-voting process locally in 2005. As of this week, they own yet again with over 30,000 of 940,000 eligible Estonians casting virtual ballots in the world's first online parliamentary election. Online voters even have the option to re-vote with a paper ballot in the event that hurried or pressured decisions were made from their remote voting locations. This option is evidently proving to be an effective way to boost voter turnout, which was only 58 percent in 2003. Let's hope this "using the internet to encourage voting" trend catches on in some other countries (ahem) that also suffer from less-than-impressive election turnouts.
