Elections 2004
April 5, 2004

Hello, good morning and how do you do? This is Cybersurf, your weekly window on the web and I am Steven Lang.
Today’s program is, as you might have expected, chock full of election related web sites, and I promise to put this script on my personal blog so that you can recover all the other addresses that I mention. So do not stress, I’ll give you the address, where you can find this script at the end of the program.
But before we look at the election stuff – here is some good news from Google – the world’s most successful search engine is testing its own web mail service. You cannot sign up for it – yet – but gmail – that is what the service is known as - – gmail offers one thousand megabytes of free storage space – so you will never have to delete any mail, and it will all be searchable.

To find out more about the pending service check out gmail.google.com.

Back to the campaign trail – we are now less than ten days away from voting day - April 14 so it is not surprising that all the media houses are putting up special features on the elections.

Our own SABCnews.com has a special elections category, and on results day, the elections feature will link up to the IEC’s computer system and publish the results directly onto the site without human intervention – in other words the SABC’s results system will be automatically updated from the minute the first result is put into the IEC’s system right until the last seats are allocated.

The site also has a feature carrying all the latest opinion poll data from the latest SABC/Markinor survey on voter attitudes about the elections

Other sites have also made a special effort – for example – the Mail and Guardian online – at mg.co.za has a rather creative, interactive section that helps you choose which party you should vote for. It does this with an interactive quiz – asking questions that direct you to the party most consistent with your views.

If you would prefer to read an in-depth analysis of the upcoming elections you should go to EISA.org.za – EISA stands for the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa – it is an ngo site and has very valuable information about democracy and political processes.

An just in case you thought that everyone was only concerned about the April fourteen elections, the demarcation board is already hard at working preparing for next year’s municipal elections. The demarcation board site at demarcation.org.za is truly fascinating because it has maps of all the voting districts in the country, lists of the new names of municipalities and you can even drill down and find a map with your own street and the location of your nearest voting station.

Now if you would like to find any of the addresses of the sites I mentioned in today’s program you can click on my own personal blog which can be found at www.stevenlang.blogspot.com – let me repeat that

And so we come the end of this week’s election edition of Cybersurf. Enjoy the festive season, drive safely, don’t forget to vote – it’s the right thing to do - and remember to keep on surfing.