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01300: Great Canadian Wish List

From: "M. Kolar" <wddm(at)mkolar.org>
Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 15:52:51 -0700
Subject: Great Canadian Wish List

More than a month ago I wrote here about the Great Canadian Wish List (GCWL).
Since then I introduced there the wish (initiative) to introduce Direct
Democracy in Canada.

The GCWL has closed today. The results are here:
http://www.cbc.ca/wish/2007/07/the_top_30_wishes.html

Total number of participants in this experiment was 19,865.

My wish to introduce Direct Democracy in Canada got 29 supporters (including
myself), i.e., only about 0.15% of all the participants were interested in
Direct Democracy.
However, the whole thing was driven by the campaign to ban abortion in Canada,
and countered by the progressives' drive to keep abortion a matter of choice.
These two groups tried to mobilize as many like-minded people as possible, many
of whom, I suspect, have not paid any attention to other wishes, so it is not
easy how many people really evaluated or even took note of the minor wishes
like mine.

Altogether, 3204 wishes (initiatives) were made, some frivolous, but many other
were thoughtful and very reasonable, and brought many new interesting ideas how
to deal with public and environmental matters.

There were reported attempts of cheating and software problems that enabled it.
Also there was no way to make sure that only Canadians participated in GCWL.
Suspicions were voiced that many Americans participated in the battle to ban
abortion.

Again, without an official Internet registry of voters in a given jurisdiction
(legalization of digital signatures), it is very difficult to say how
meaningful any Internet voting results really are.

Mirek



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