French Electronic Voting Turned into Farce

The country’s first electronic election seems to be turning into a farce. Indeed, the reports are coming in of the sort of election rigging that one would expect from 3rd world countries, not France. It turned out that an "online-primary" claimed as "fraud-proof" and "ultra secure" as the Maginot Line is vulnerable to a Blizkrieg of multiple and fake voting.

The oncoming election was supposed to anoint a rising star of the moderate right – Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 39. The latter was the Party's candidate in the election for mayor of Paris in 2014. The only problem was that she abstained in the final parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage a few months ago. The industry experts pointed out that it was going to be a tight election.

Afterwards, journalists from Metronews claimed that it was easy to breach the allegedly strict security of the election and voted a few times under different names in order to prove their point.

The new approach suggested that Parisians had to vote by making a credit card payment of €3 and providing the name and address of someone on the city's electoral roll. However, Metronews journalist managed to vote 5 times in total by paying with the same credit card under different names which, by the way, included “Nicolas Sarkozy”.

This situation appeared especially tricky for the UMP Party, because the latter has been accused of election fraud earlier. The matter is that back in 2012, the UMP almost split amid allegations of ballot-stuffing and other dirty tricks in an election in order to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as the national party president. An ex-Prime Minister, François Fillon, accused his competitor, the Party Secretary General, Jean-Francois Copé, of "fraud on an industrial scale".

China Closed Web for Maintenance

It seems that the Chinese government just switched off the Internet last week when it became concerned that some people might remember the importance of the date. The matter is that it was the 24th anniversary of the massacre of protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

The authorities have come to a decision that the best way to commemorate the massacre is by declaring it “Internet maintenance day”. As a result, everyone had to spend the day updating their servers being unconnected to the worldwide web. In order to help the loyal network managers, the Chinese authorities simply switched off the web so that they weren’t bothered by too much traffic.

Of course, they couldn’t shut off the entire Internet, so a number of websites were told to commemorate Internet maintenance day while others had to update their servers in the normal manner. The websites under maintenance included blogs and portals which could want to remember 4 June for reasons other than being a patch Tuesday. In the meanwhile, the Twitter-like Sina Weibo was working, as well as the Chinese operations for MSN and Yahoo. The most interesting fact is that for some reason the dictionary website WordKu.com only offered one page showing a definition for the word "encore". Media reports say that a picture which edited the iconic image of a man standing in front of a column of tanks by replacing them with rubber ducks was censored as well.