Slashdot Mirror
Canada Police Execute Search Warrant over Election Results
Anonymous Coward writes "According to this article from the Vancouver Sun, a Canadian man's home was raided Friday by police because he posted the results of the Canadian election on his website. What is this world coming to when publishing the truth has become a crime? Is it only a matter of time before laws like this one creep south into the United States?" It's an interesting question. (See previous story.) The government certainly has a strong interest in trying to create a fair elections process, but perhaps this is a bit overzealous. It's worth noting that the news agencies in the United States are withdrawing from the exit-polling association that they formed many years ago to conduct coordinated exit polls after major elections (and embargo the results until the polls close), so the next U.S. election may see a hodge-podge of advance reporting as well.
non-Canadian webserver.
Guarantee of Rights and Freedoms
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Fundamental Freedoms
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
I'm not a legal expert, by any stretch of the imagination. As a Canadian citizen, however, my understanding of the above excerpt from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says that the Elections Act gag law preventing the "transmission to the public" of the results from a closed poll violates the Charter.
I say good luck, I hope he wins and they repeal the law, in favor of something that makes a little more sense, and doesn't infringe on our freedoms.
Derek Lewis
Derek Lewis
(remove the spam-free to email me)
So my question is, how did he get the information? And how can you charge someone with posting non-copyrighted/confidential/classified information in any media publication? Rights of the press and all that?
I wouldn't want to have laws that were applied so strictly and asbolutely. A legal system that allows for such flexibility based on ths situation is quite admirable. You hit the nail right on the head when you pointed out the reasoning: it is "demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society"
This law is designed to protect democracy. If you knew the probable outcome of the election before you voted, wouldn't you take that into consideration when casting your ballot, or when deciding whether to vote at all? This is a very intelligent law, which exists to maintain the integrity of the electoral process.
This law was not written with the internet in mind -- it was designed to prevent television and radio stations from prematurely broadcasting results from more easterly time zones. Since the internet will become more of an issue as each year passes, the law will probably cease to become effective. If this happens, the simple solution would be to keep ballot boxes closed across the country until polls close on the west coast.
We could do that right now. It would certainly eliminate any "free speech" concerns. Fortunately, Canadians are willing to look at the big picture, instead of seeing laws only in black and white.
Because there's a 4.5 hour time difference between east and west, it isn't necessarily realistic to expect all the polls to close at once. However, it would be quite simple to prevent the media from publishing *any* polling results until all the polls across the country were closed. We are ending up in a mess because local media in the east is reporting results, but national broadcast of this data is prohibited - obviously difficult to enforce, and also considered censorship, curtailment of liberty, yadda yadda.
So, Elections Canada should simply not release any data regarding the vote count until all the polls are closed. However, the media will still want to use exit polling data in their broadcasts - since this also pretty much counts as "polling results", these should not be published either - but then we get into the same censorship issue. So, we're back to the tradeoffs between individual liberty and the good of the society as a whole...
I adblock all animated gifs.
Blessed be the prime numbered slashdotters
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society
THat means that, if it serves the interests of democracy and justice, these rights can be changed in certain situations.
You can jail someone. That takes away several of their freedoms... but it serves society and justice.
The law this man broke is there *specifically* to ensure a fair election process. He broke it. What's the problem?
Actually I think that is a large stretch - care to explain why you think otherwise?
Reporting how voting is going, whether based on exit polls or actual counts in some other district, is completely unrelated to the issue of privacy or anonymity. The only way privacy would be compromised is if a live vote count were displayed above each polling booth, or something like that, and that's a big stretch.
You did put your finger on something important, though, which is that privacy does involve restriction of information. There are some unique features about this, though: the information that an individual has a right to keep private is information that affects only that individual, his family & friends etc. As soon as information has legitimate relevance to the public, however, the right to privacy often has to give way to the "public's right to know". In the case of an election, there are clear and obvious reasons why privacy and anonymity are important; but that has nothing to do with the dissemination of aggregate information, as long as that is done without compromising privacy.
Restriction of information on the grounds that "the public can't be trusted to respond 'correctly' " is not the way to achieve a fair society. It smacks of a kind of elitism that might have had some justification a couple of hundred years ago, when the electorate wasn't as well educated, but we would do well to reexamine such assumptions today.
It is illegal to publish results until all countries have finished polling, so we don't know the results of our vote until several days later.
But we don't regard this as an erosion of our right to free speech. We regard it as a fundamental democratic safeguard. Maybe some other countries could learn something from this.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Simple: it allows citizens to make a fully-informed choice about how they vote. After all, unless you also plan to ban polling prior to the election, these days people usually have a pretty good idea of how their countrymen are planning to vote. It's not possible (nor desirable!) to prevent people from planning their vote strategically. Deliberately withholding information either before or during an election is unlikely to be beneficial to the overall process.
This is closely related to your concern about, in effect, the "anonymity" of an entire state or province's vote. The availability of intermediate results would allow people even in the earliest time zones to consider the actions of their fellow citizens when voting. This isn't a bad thing. In fact, the only reason publicizing intermediate results can be considered bad, is if you've chosen to attempt to suppress the overall results. One bad decision leads to another, until the whole package appears somehow inevitable. In fact, it is inevitable: the result of the initial bad decision to try to suppress information.
My concern with suppressing information of this kind is this: by encouraging governments to believe that laws which suppress information are beneficial, and by encouraging citizens to believe that such laws are benign, we create paternalistic governments, governments which don't think twice about hiding information from their citizens, governments that ultimately are dangerous. Election Canada's actions against Paul Bryan, searching his apartment, seizing his hard disks, and forcing him to legally defend his actions, are an example of what I'm talking about.
To justify withholding of information, there has to be a concern of overriding importance being addressed. National security, for example, is used as such a justification. But in the case of elections, there is no such justification. I don't see how it can be argued that knowledge of voting patterns in other areas is such a threat to a nation's integrity, that citizens should have their right to communicate with each other curtailed. As I have briefly argued, I believe the opposite is true: the information is useful to citizens, and should be made available.
I thought the other reply to your message raised an interesting point about the effect of the election on the Canadian dollar. This reminded me of another context in which free information is important: markets. I think one can draw a parallel between voting and economic markets: the value of your vote, and the value of a given candidate, doesn't exist in isolation, but rather is highly dependent on what everyone else is doing. A vote is a resource with value; you want to utilize that resource in the way that does most good. Just as you might choose not to buy shares in a company whose share price is plummeting, you might choose not to vote for a candidate who is losing badly, and instead vote for a candidate you believe has a chance of winning. This is a valid choice, and it is not up to governments to withhold this choice from their citizens.
I think you contradict yourself somewhat when on the one hand you say "The only 'correct' vote is the vote for your conscience, and the only 'wasted' vote is one against it", and on the other hand you say "The very fact that you don't know how other people are voting forces you to consider your vote more carefully". Does one's conscience change because of knowing about other people's votes? Or are you suggesting that knowing about other people's votes is a "temptation" which leads them astray from their consciences? And thus, to the conclusion that people cannot be trusted with the information, which is exactly what disturbs me?
This attitude is a largely unexamined hangover from a long, long time ago. When media first started making it possible to communicate election information across countries in short amounts of time, this worried politicians and citizens who were just more comfortable with the way it used to be.
The concern is the alleged danger of people changing their vote, or not voting, as a result of hearing results from somewhere else. However, if a citizen truly has an interest in the government and politics of their country, they are likely to vote anyway, since their are all sort of other reasons to vote than simply to cause the selection of a particular favored politician.
An educated populace should understand this, and vote accordingly, regardless of what they may hear about other parts of the country.
True, the majority of the population in most democratic nations probably don't understand this, but that is either their own fault, or the fault of education. The latter can be corrected by better education about these matters, while the former is easily addressed: I believe it was Michael Moore who, instead of cajoling people to go out and vote, said on TV just prior to the election "If you haven't figured out why it's important to vote yet, please DON'T VOTE!"
As usual in situations where the desire to censor information exists, the underlying flaw in the logic is the assumption that the information should be restricted in the first place.