So far, so good ... so Santorum!

Dave Mustaine, lead singer for Megadeth, told the CBC's George Stroumboulopoulos that freedom of speech is his biggest worry.

He then told Stroumboulopoulos, "To me, the guy who makes the most sense out of all those guys is Rick Santorum. He just looked like he could be a really cool President, kinda like a JFK kinda guy."

Rick Santorum wants to assign a little man with a big eraser to wipe out pornography.*



I know that Mustaine turned born-again Christian a few years ago. And if Mustaine's current vision of freedom of speech is consistent with banning pornography, then I'll just disagree with him.

But wouldn't it be nice if there were some kind of knowledge test attached to a ballot so if you were casting a vote for somebody because you say he supports X, but he's actually very publicly promised to ban X, you'd have your ballot discarded? It would be for the voter's own good: a voter protection measure.

HT: @acoyne

* Ah, the good old days.

Meanwhile, in Canada

The same government that considered the mandatory long form census so strong an invasion of privacy that it was worth destroying the continuity of the census data series is requiring ISPs to maintain extensive logs on users and to hand them over to police without warrants; ISPs are banned from telling customers of any government snooping unless given explicit permission by the police.

Tony Clement, back in 2010:

“It is not appropriate to compel citizens to divulge how many bedrooms they have in their houses, or what time they leave for work in the morning,” Clement said. “The government’s approach is about finding a better balance between collecting necessary data and protecting the privacy rights of Canadians.”

Vic Toews, Public Safety Minister, last week:

Critics of a bill that would give law enforcement new powers to access Canadians' electronic communications are aligning themselves with child pornographers, Canada's public safety minister says.

"He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers," Vic Toews said of Liberal public safety critic Francis Scarpaleggia during question period on Monday, after Scarpaleggia asked about a bill expected to be tabled Tuesday.

Odd that it's more of an intrusion to have to tell the government how many bedrooms you have than to #TellVicEverything about what sites you might be visiting while in the bedroom. Australia is no better.

Meanwhile, some Canadian universities will start letting IP folks trawl through faculty emails to see if anybody's sharing gated journal articles. I expect most folks at Toronto and Western to flip quickly over to Gmail. This while the #AAASmtg has been exploring the notion that research has been biased towards materials faculty can access; this adds a hurdle to research efforts for folks at smaller schools with less extensive online journal holdings. It would be interesting to see what bias was induced into paper citations by JSTOR's moving wall.

New Zealand is getting worse too. But it's getting worse slower than other places. Shame that the National government hasn't figured out that one of our comparative advantages is in freedom, and in particular tech freedom; we ought not have bent over so quickly when the FBI came calling for Kim DotCom. American tech folks looking for exit options have noticed...

Election gags and efficient markets

New Zealand's election stock market has to suspend trading from midnight Saturday 'till polls close that evening. Why? The election gag law:

Between 12am and 7pm on Election Day, trading on all NZ political contracts will be suspended. This is to comply with s197 of the Electoral Act, which very roughly says that it is illegal for people to speak to each other on Election Day, and following advice from the Electoral Commission. Between those times:

• Trading on all contracts under Election 2011 and Politics NZ will be suspended. It being perfectly legal to influence voters with not-quite current data, visitors to the site will be able to view the contracts but not trade them. Trading on contracts in other categories will continue.
• The commenting on the forum will also be disabled in this period.
• A banner will alert visitors to the fact that they are looking at data that is not current.

... Contracts not listed in NZ Politics and Elections 2011 will generally remain open, although we reserve the right to suspend trading on contracts in other categories which we discover pose a threat to democracy.

Any pre-suspension price manipulation will be backed out and traders responsible may find their iPredict accounts suspended until after Official Results Declared on 10 December.

Read that last paragraph again. Recall that manipulators typically increase market efficiency by providing liquidity and subsidizing other traders. But that doesn't work where the Electoral Commission bans trading at 12:00 Friday night. And so Matt's going to have to be up late figuring out which trades are attempts at jerking the prices around and then unwinding them rather than letting the distributed set of traders do it for him. The Electoral Commissioner's rule makes it more rather than less likely that somebody tries to use iPredict prices to affect folks' voting intentions.

I'm totally swamped. But here's a mission for somebody. Get the price series on some of the electoral contracts at iPredict. Run some correlations with NZX stocks that will continue trading on Saturday and whose price movements are likely correlated with election outcomes - try Contact, Chorus, Fletcher Building for starters. Ag stocks will also take a hit of Labour/Green are in as they'd then come under the ETS more quickly. If there's any reasonable correlation between those contracts and changes in the likelihood of a National victory, publish the method and results on Friday, with instructions on how anybody could pull up the Saturday prices and plug them into the algorithm. Then, on Saturday, just post the NZX prices of those contracts without mentioning the election. Ta-dah! You've just created a noisy proxy for the iPredict prices that's easily updated on election day without risking a spanking from the electoral commissioner.*

I wonder whether CentreBet will update prices during the day.

*Don't take legal advice from me; I'm likely wrong.

Election gag

Usually I get to be smug about stupid laws that New Zealand doesn't have. But not in this case. The Electoral Commission prohibits putting new third party election or referendum advertising material on websites on polling day. The definition of advertising material for third parties is pretty broad. Here's a piece from May on likely implications:

Chief Electoral Officer Robert Peden said material posted on social media websites, including Facebook and Twitter, was covered by the rules.

"People should be aware that if they tweeted on election day to influence how somebody votes they will be breaching the Act and the commission will take action," Mr Peden told NZPA.

"For a long time, the law has allowed for campaign-free election days, and my sense is that New Zealanders like it that way and so it's not really in people's interest to do things like tweet and breach the rules."

While people are allowed to leave websites with campaign material up on election day, they may not add further material or advertise the website.

The sites would be monitored on November 26, and that people caught breaking the rules could face a $20,000 fine, Mr Peden said.

"It's the sort of thing that we will hear about if someone's doing it. We'll receive complaints."

After Twitter query, @LewStoddart, @thomasbeagle and @lyndonhood all pointed me to this piece.

The Electoral Commission advises that no campaigning of any kind is allowed on election day. This covers any statement that is likely to influence a voter as to which candidate, party or referendum option they should or shouldn’t vote for, or which influences people to abstain from voting.

I don't know whether that means tweets encouraging voting are allowed while those discouraging it aren't allowed, or whether both are disallowed. Surely an MP or activist tweeting "Go Vote" to his followers is influencing voters. But they make a big deal about encouraging abstention or encouraging particular candidates while being quiet about statements encouraging the vote.

The Press even reports [HT: @JeetSheth] that you can't make general statements about likely weather effects on that day's turnout.

Do not mention the weather and the election in the same breath on Saturday, whatever you do. No weather anywhere in the country can be reported publicly and linked to voting from 9am to 7pm on election day, the Electoral Commission says. The commission says that, under the 1993 Electoral Act, "statements such as `weather looks a bit bleak, turnout quiet at this polling place' would be prohibited as such a statement could be construed as discouraging people from voting". Section 197 of the act "does not just prohibit statements likely to influence voters as to who to vote for or not vote for". The act also prohibits any statement advising or intended or likely to influence any elector to abstain from voting, the commission said. Any loose comment about sunny spells encouraging or discouraging voters could result in a fine of up to $20,000.

So a weatherman doing the usual "reporting from in the weather" story with a polling place as backdrop would get in trouble if he commented on whether those voters were enjoying the sun or bundled up for cold. And, I suppose, anybody else noting too loudly just how bad the weather is and what a great day it is to stay home and watch movies would get in trouble too.

What if I tweeted encouraging people to vote, but everyone knew I was only doing it ironically? Something like "Go Vote and help encourage the legitimacy of the state and the moral principle that 50.01% is the voice of God". How about using clever special characters to tweet the binomial formulation of the voter's probability of decisiveness and thereby discouraged mathematicians' turnout? How about tweets pointing to George Smith's tracts against voting coupled with text saying "Don't read this, he's wrong"?

Would a blog post very neutrally specifying the mathematics of decisiveness under MMP implicitly be encouraging abstention and consequently be banned?

Is it possible that it's legal to phone your friends and offer a ride to the polling place while noting the merits of your preferred candidate, but illegal to post the same offer to a Facebook group of the same friends?

So many questions. But I'm far too cowardly to test things on Saturday. Pretty much anything I say on Saturday could be interpreted as being intended to encourage abstention, because I've a long track record of encouraging abstention.

I think I'm going to have to declare Saturday to be a Twitter and blogging holiday.

Update: Here's The Herald.