Elections Nova Scotia quietly posted the poll-by-poll results of  the October 8 Nova Scotia election on its website last Thursday Preliminary poll-by-poll results are normally released immediately after the vote, but this year, for the first time in living memory, elections bureaucrats decided to keep the detailed results to themselves for three weeks. The only explanation offered was that the Chronicle-Herald wasn't interested in publishing them (as it had traditionally), so Chief Electoral Officer Richard P. Temporale decided no one else could have them either. Aside from this inexcusable delay, the agency did a good job of presenting the tallies, making them available in...

03 November, 2013

In a break with decades of past practice, Nova Scotia elections officials say they will withhold detailed results of the October 7 8 election for almost a month. In previous provincial elections, newspapers published poll-by-poll results a day or two after the vote. At a time when the internet has encouraged governments of all shapes and sizes to be more forthcoming with useful data, Elections Nova Scotia is moving in the opposite direction. Dana Phillip Doiron, director of policy and communications, declined to explain the policy change except to say the Chronicle-Herald "had no interest" in publishing this election's poll-by-poll results, and...

17 October, 2013

The election took place a week ago, but Elections Nova Scotia has still not published the poll-by-poll results from each riding. This, despite a notice on the agency's website (see right) promising to post them by last Friday. In past elections, newspapers carried the poll-by-poll results two days after the vote, if not the very next day. These were understood to be unofficial results. Minor adjustments inevitably followed before the final, official results were published in a booklet. But the preliminary totals have always been public information. Elections Nova Scotia obviously has the numbers. Why is it withholding them? I suspect we will hear...

14 October, 2013

It all began with this: Then this and this in rapid succession: One smart-ass tweeter caught the Elections NS spirit: The results from Needham: Not all ballot makers are created equal: Here's a spelling-challenged ballot forger: Ballot-making as political speech: This guy voted three times: I don't know. Those Xs look suspiciously familiar. Feel free to send us your proof of voting facsimile.  ...

08 October, 2013

Now that we have freed the 2011 election donations data from the deadening grasp of Elections Nova Scotia, there's no end to the interesting things one can do with it. For example: In 2011, 4130 Nova Scotians...

16 August, 2012

Here at last is Contrarian's searchable map of 2011 political donations in Nova Scotia: [Direct link to map] Each dot represents a donation. The dots are color-coded by party: orange (and brown) for NDP; red for Liberal; blue for PC; green for Green; and white for Atlantica. The larger dots stand for donations of $1,000 or more. Clicking on an individual dot reveals a pop-up table listing the name and address of the donor, the party to whom they donated, and the amount and type of donation. Use the + and – slider on the left side of the map to zoom...

12 August, 2012

When information is presented in a format computer programs can read, as opposed to a static, telephone directory-style list, fresh insights spring from the data. Contrarian friend Gus Reed prepared a compendium of revelations arising from Elections Nova Scotia's annual political donations report—once we liberated it from the cloistered format favored by the former Chief Electoral Officer. Some examples: Does Nova Scotia have a party of the rich? Not according to the donations made in 2010. When Gus plotted the proportion of donations against their size, all three major parties showed a remarkably similar distributions: Vote tallies for the three major parties in...

22 June, 2012

In a series of posts last September, Contrarian revealed that Nova Scotia's Chief Electoral Officer had degraded the format used to report political donations over $50. For the first time, she released the file as a scanned PDF that cannot be searched or readily copied to other formats. Helpful Contrarian readers promptly hacked* McCulloch's degraded files, enabling us to republish the data in the searchable, text-grab-friendly format used in previous years’ reports. Today's long overdue follow-up provides the data in two new, even more useful and interesting formats: An Excel spreadsheet readers can view, parse, and re-use in ways limited only by their imaginations and...

21 June, 2012

Before the end of June, each year, Nova Scotia law requires the Chief Electoral Officer to a publish all the political contributions made in the previous year. For the years 2007, 2008, and 2009, Christine McCulloch complied with the law, posting the information to the Elections Nova Scotia website in a manner that was accessible, searchable, printable, and even, with effort, downloadable to a citizen's own database. This gave every citizen the tools to determine whether contractors who won big roadbuilding contracts, storeowners who won liquor commission franchises, or communications consultants (like me!) who were selected for Communications Nova Scotia's Standing...

05 September, 2011

Chief Electoral Officer Christine McCulloch's annual report has been posted, and it confirms our report last week that she has initiated deregistration proceedings against the Green Party for failure to comply with financial disclosure laws. As the chart above shows, the failure appears to be complete across the board: No audited financial statements, no public access thereto, and no copies or accounting of tax receipts. The Green Party of Nova Scotia received $133,469.90 in public financing last year. McCulloch's report doesn't say when deregistration will take effect, but over the weekend  party officials told contrarian they had until July 17 to avoid...

29 June, 2009
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