Swedes Cast Write-In Votes for SQL Injection, Donald Duck 210
An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish elections were held recently (the third Sunday of September to be exact) and it seems that a few people tried to interfere with the election by voting for parties which were in effect named to be SQL injection attacks or similar. Clever stuff! Little Bobby Tables in real life."
That wasn't the only oddity of the election; reader MZeroOne writes: "The Swedish Election Authority published the results of last Sunday's general election and even though the current prime minister retained power, the candidate who got the most individual handwritten votes was Disney's Donald Duck." Maybe the existence of the Hard Alcohol Party (237 votes) helps explain why the Pirate Party didn't have a better showing.
For those who don't read XKCD. (Score:5, Informative)
The 'Little Bobby Tables' reference:
"Exploits of a Mom"
http://xkcd.com/327/ [xkcd.com]
Hard Alcohol Party... (Score:4, Informative)
... sadly isn't what you'd think. They are antibooze-ists. Huge disappointment.
Translated homepage: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http://www.spritpartiet.se/&prev=_t&twu=1
On a separate note, other notable entities voted for were "Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits", and a silly javascript insertion attempt. Full data at http://www.val.se/val/val2010/handskrivna/handskrivna.skv
Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Most pirates probably just vote for the green party (miljöpartiet) instead - they changed their policy to support filesharing after the pp got 7% in the EU election - because they are a mainstream party and there was no doubt that they would get in. How much of a difference this has made I don't know but they did do very well in the election.
Their internet-related policies [www.mp.se]
Re:SQL Injection? (Score:4, Informative)
More than you might think [wikipedia.org].
Re:For those who are American (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder (Score:4, Informative)
Just a few things:
1) The EU and national elections are really not comparable, people care about so vastly different things. Neither before, during or after did PP have anything like a 7% support in polls for the national parliament. But in retrospect, they didn't have a good enough national election platform to push while they still had media's attention because all the effort had gone into the EU election. They got silent and when it was ready media had lost attention.
2) There has been extremely little room for any other than the traditional parties and SD who got almost 3% in the last election, the number of "other" votes dropped from 2.75% to 1.41% and all others backed while PP increased from 0.63% to 0.65%. All major issues related to PPs politics have been pushed back to past the election, like the TPB trial who "coincidentally" begins next week.
3) It might look more like an activist group, but as long as no party is willing to seriously fight for the same issues then PP will have to fight for representation on their own. It took three days after the election for the Greens - including the Swedish representative - to vote for another anti-filesharing bill in the EU, they are only playing the populist opinion but will trade it away in any negotiation.
4) There have been no rounds ot mass lawsuits in Sweden, TPB is still up and running, they get some of the world's best free services like Spotify, in short people don't see the immidiate need for political change. But polls asking people for their opinions rather which party they'd vote for show that PP is having an effect on the attitude to copyrights. More and more people dispute that copyright infringement equals theft. If it again becomes a political topic, PP will do better than last "wave".
Personally I'm at least hopeful for 2014...
Re:For those who don't read XKCD. (Score:1, Informative)
The blind slashdotters.
Re:Yuck it up (Score:2, Informative)
Nazis? They are actually more Israel friendly than most established parties, and one of their MP:s is jewish.
While their ideological platform is built mainly on restricting immigration, that hardly qualifies as nazism. And joke votes are hardly a sign of apathy. If you really need to point fingers, why not aim them at the ~18% of the population that didn't vote at all? Get your facts straight.
Re:Yuck it up (Score:3, Informative)
The SD was created by the merger of several small, right-wing anti immigration parties, some of which were pretty openly nazist. The Jewish community in Sweden are among the many who accuse them of still "wearing their brown shirts under their jackets".
For what it's worth, though, there is still at least one openly neo-nazi party that did not join them, and now occupies the niche (such as it is) on their right.
Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder (Score:1, Informative)
Miljöpartiet recently voted in favor of tougher enforcement of intellectual property laws in the EU parliament. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/mp-kraver-hardare-tag-mot-fildelare/&prev=_t [google.com]
Re:For those who are American (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Bern is the capital of Switzerland (which is also famous for the clocks), and Hitler was born in Austria and was the dictator of Germany. It looks like you've got some problems with geography and history.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder (Score:3, Informative)
They also proposed non-commercial copyright infringement be completely legal.
Yes, because millions are doing it anyway; the law is next to useless and serves no point except to criminalize teenagers in their bedrooms
On the other hand, they didn't (for example) say anything about forcing the BBC to abandon DRM, support open standards for distributing its own work, and use CC (or similar) licensing for license-fee funded programming.
This is plain wrong: from the relevant section of the PPUK Manifesto [pirateparty.org.uk]
Government copyrights are increasingly becoming a problem for society, with data such as maps and postcodes being jealously protected by government departments. We will introduce a new right of access to government funded data, requiring the release of all maps, statistics and so on that have been paid for by the taxpayer in open formats, under a Creative Commons or similar licence, giving the public access to research that they have already paid for. An exception will be made for cases that genuinely have national security or privacy concerns.
This will include the output of the BBC, which is funded by the licence paying public and should therefore belong to the licence paying public. We will amend the BBC's charter to prevent the BBC from using DRM technology, and to require the BBC to release all their content under a Creative Commons licence. We pledge to maintain and expand the current list of important national events that cannot be exclusively broadcast pay TV services, and we pledge to put into action the government's existing but widely ignored Open Source Action Plan, which would encourage the use of free software in the public sector, saving money, and making the UK less reliant on foreign software suppliers.
As you can see, we covered all of that.
Re:Donald Duck (Score:5, Informative)
Spelt is a valid and common spelling. I'm not from North America.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spelt#Etymology_1 [wiktionary.org]
Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder (Score:3, Informative)