While watching the conspiracy theories being thrown around on MSNBC and CNN last night, I couldn’t help thinking that relying on email on an important election day was probably not the best strategy.

For those of you who had not seen the story, Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman’s web site and email went down on Primary day. Mopocket.com has a great post about it today that was right in line with what I was thinking last night.

Lieberman’s camp was not able to communicate with their supporters, and a valuable campaign tool (their website) was not available on the most important day.

SMS text messages are so much more reliable than email. With email you just send it off into cyberspace and hope it get’s to the right server. When it gets there, you still have to deal with spam filters, and then it’s routed to the spam filter on your desktop client.

Text messaging is fast and reliable. Hopefully other politicians running in the November elections will take note of Lieberman’s disaster and use mobile as a secondary means of communicating with their supports, and voters.

Better yet, what would be really cool would be if we could vote from our phones the way we choose American Idol winners. You could easily guarantee that no one votes twice, and the votes could be instantly calculated. We surely wouldn’t have had to worry about those “hanging chads”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 7:52 pm and is filed under General, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.