Posts Tagged ‘election results’
Icelanders punish Conservatives at the polls
Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
It is a tale of light and dark — of a small but rugged country far from anywhere that has suffered as severely as any in the developed world at the hands of buccaneering free-marketeers, but which is now slowly digging itself out from the financial wreckage.
An important milestone was reached on Saturday, when the country’s voters went to the polls to elect a new government, three months after riotous street protests over the country’s banking collapse forced the country’s conservative-led administration from office.
With about a third of the final vote counted late Saturday, it seemed that the country’s leftist caretaking government would be formally voted into power, with the Social Democrats projected to gain 22 seats and their partners, the Left-Greens, appearing to gain 13 seats in the 63-seat Parliament. The conservative Independent Party, ousted after a wave of demonstrations in January, was projected to gain just 14 seats with less than 23 percent of the vote, down considerably from its total in 2007. Final results are to be announced later today.
The conservatives were one of the first governments anywhere to lose office because of the global financial crisis, and it seemed clear Saturday that voters in this country of 320,000 were imposing a further reckoning.
The Independent Party has been blamed for a perceived complicity in the banks’ accumulating unsustainable, multibillion debts, and their partnership with a group of freewheeling Icelandic entrepreneurs known as the “New Vikings…”
About the only thing the New Vikings didn’t do in their attempt to imitate American neocons – was declare war on the Faroe Islands.
I truly love Iceland, though it’s been many years since I’ve visited. The rugged and wild landscape is part and parcel of the national ethos of independence. Part of what brought them to boot the U.S. Air Force off the island-nation after decades.
I’ve Posted before about their new Prime Minister and the economic problems they had to overcome.
Hope they make it through to the other side, soon.
Franken to be declared the new senator in Minnesota
Daylife/Getty Images
Democrat Al Franken will be declared the winner of the tight U.S. Senate contest in Minnesota, emerging from a ballot recount with a slim margin over Republican Norm Coleman…
“At the moment, Franken has a 225-vote lead,” after the weekend counting of what were deemed the last uncounted absentee ballots, said Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat who oversaw the process.
Ritchie said unless the supreme court acts on Coleman’s request and orders more ballots to be counted, he will reconvene the state’s Canvassing Board on Monday to certify Franken as the winner of the November 4 contest.
Even so, Coleman’s campaign said it will likely challenge the result, which would require the state supreme court’s chief justice to appoint three judges to investigate its claims…
The recount of some 2.4 million votes cast for the pair has swung back and forth over several weeks. Coleman initially held the edge, but his narrow victory margin necessitated the recount under state law.
“The recount has been done so precisely, and so transparently,” it would be difficult to envision a challenge succeeding, Ritchie said.
Not that it means squat to the nutballs still in charge of the Republican Party.
As I’ve stated in other posts, I sincerely hope the existing den of neocons stays in charge of the Republicans for another four years. That should guarantee enough time to see if the Obama experiment bears fruit.
I think it likely – the staying in control as well as the experiment. On the Democrat side, nothing more is proposed than simple humanist governance of the sort that’s worked well as premise in Western Europe since the end of WW2. On the Republican side, greed and an accustomed fist holding control of graft and corruption is hard for any gangster to give up.
Bloggers ignore ban on posting Canadian election results
Canada’s 70-year-old law to control the release of voting results on election night has again stumbled in the age of the Internet. Within minutes of polls closing on Canada’s Atlantic Coast on Tuesday bloggers were making the results known in parts of the country where voting was still going on.
“I believe the polls have just closed in Newfoundland so gentlemen, to your mark, ready, go,” read a posting from a blogger writing under the moniker The Surly Beaver.
The results showing the Liberals were losing seats in that region hinted at the final outcome that saw Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper win a stronger minority government.
That would violate a 1938 law aimed at preventing knowledge of results in Eastern Canada from influencing voting in a later time zone, a spokeswoman for Elections Canada said on Wednesday.
The law was aimed at radio broadcasts in a country with six time zones, and has been difficult to enforce with the invention of the Internet.
Probably a reasonable law; but, when did reason start governing what people do on the Internet?
