The Duluth News Tribune has been running "Mayoral Madness" on its editorial page. It has devised a play-off among the twelve candidates and has online voting for each pair. When today's pair had 56% (Charlie Bell) and 44% (Don Ness), I wondered if Bell got 7 votes and Ness 5. The DNT did not give vote totals.
I found out from a Don Ness campaign update that the vote had been running the other way until late when a huge number of votes were cast for Bell. Did lots of Bell supporters get a cheerleading message and rush to their computers, or did somebody deliberately cast a lot of votes?
The problem with this kind of voting is how easily it can be manipulated. The winner of the vote may get more publicity out of all proportion to the actual interest among real voters. This kind of voting Makes news instead of reporting news.
Another problem is that the electronic voters are even more self-selected than election-day voters. The electronic voters have to have an interest in participating, the tools to participate, and the time to participate. True, election-day voters need these also, but there is more cultural pressure to participate. Current electronic voting also has a heavier burden of "does it really matter."
The whole array of internet opportunites to participate in discussions or solving your own problems annoys me.
There are thousands and thousands of discussion boards on almost any subject. If you participate, you should participate. When I was a sysop on GEnie, a defunct private precursor to the web, people called those who only read "lurkers". I didn't like the term because it implied that they were spies rather than those who may not have had much to say. Those who do participate in discussion boards have to spend a lot of time reading and writing their messages. Even one message board could take an hour a day to read new messages and reply to a few. If the message board is very popular, you could get an overwhelming number of responses to your message. If it is not popular, you may never get an answer to your question.
Even if a message board is popular you may never get an answer to your question. This can be especially true of product support message boards. It could be you didn't phrase your question correctly, few are interested in your problem, or if interested, no other user has a good answer to your problem. Meanwhile, every few days you work your way through the log-in process, work your way through new messages, and go away disappointed. I much prefer direct email support, even if I sometimes get completely unsatisfactory answers.
