IT may have taken a little voter fraud, but I finally have the NBA All Star voting widget.
Apparently, you have to vote to get the code for the widget. I know absolutely nothing about pro basketball (I go to Syracuse, it's all about NCAA!), so ten lucky players just got my vote because their names all started with my favorite letter.
Voting for the NBA All-star team began last Thursday at NBA.com, stadiums, via good ol' snail mail, and, for the first time, via widgets available at NBA.com.
The number of votes cast for the teams increased to over 69 million votes last year, a 17% increase. The 2004 Presidential election saw a 16% increase from 2004 (though the number of votes was nearly double the number of NBA All-star ballots), according to numbers from the FEC.
Come January, it will interesting to see if the widget makes a difference in voting numbers, and even more interesting if the NBA can offer a break-down of the demographics. Perhaps the widget is the new voting booth--perhaps it takes this ultimate convenience (laziness) to get the youth vote out.
Widget as enabler...it's an interesting proposition. Would more people vote for political elections, from president to your town's zoning board, if they could do it through their neighbor's MySpace instead of schlupping over to the polling station?
Even if the numbers went up though, I'd worry they'd be random votes--votes that came in simply because it was easy to vote, without any research or care. But in a one-click world, maybe we just need the simplicity.
Apparently, you have to vote to get the code for the widget. I know absolutely nothing about pro basketball (I go to Syracuse, it's all about NCAA!), so ten lucky players just got my vote because their names all started with my favorite letter.
Voting for the NBA All-star team began last Thursday at NBA.com, stadiums, via good ol' snail mail, and, for the first time, via widgets available at NBA.com.
The number of votes cast for the teams increased to over 69 million votes last year, a 17% increase. The 2004 Presidential election saw a 16% increase from 2004 (though the number of votes was nearly double the number of NBA All-star ballots), according to numbers from the FEC.
Come January, it will interesting to see if the widget makes a difference in voting numbers, and even more interesting if the NBA can offer a break-down of the demographics. Perhaps the widget is the new voting booth--perhaps it takes this ultimate convenience (laziness) to get the youth vote out.
Widget as enabler...it's an interesting proposition. Would more people vote for political elections, from president to your town's zoning board, if they could do it through their neighbor's MySpace instead of schlupping over to the polling station?
Even if the numbers went up though, I'd worry they'd be random votes--votes that came in simply because it was easy to vote, without any research or care. But in a one-click world, maybe we just need the simplicity.
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