the staging zone^α

Today has been an interesting one in the run up to the general election in a few months' time. The day started off normal enough, but as I was checking Twitter this morning, I noticed a surprisingly large amount of tweets about the election. Still, I shrugged it off as a mere coincidence.

Later on in the day, I caught a glimpse of Google's homepage, carrying a message encouraging people to register to vote. But as I (gasp) don't use Google myself, that message could have been on there all week for all I knew.

It wasn't until I was browsing my students' union's website that I figured out what was going on. Hidden behind a carousel that required the user to have JavaScript enabled (a feature I usually disable by default), I found the following banner on the website's homepage:

My initial reaction to this image was that of confusion. The banner was clearly prompting users to register to vote, but I thought I had already done that! Had the government only allocated today for registration? Looking through my emails, I did find a confirmation of my registration from last year, after my local council ordered me to do so, threatening me with legal action if I refused.

Attempting to discern any more information from the banner proved fruitless. With no logo to inform me of the organisation that was running this apparent campaign, and a hashtag reading "#BATHBEHEARD", I could only come to the conclusion that it was some sort of concoction by the students' union. But oh was I wrong… Actually clicking the link simply took me to a generic web page showing information about the election, but nothing about this mysterious and oh-so-important "National Voter Registration Day". If further action was required by the end of the day, I had better get a move on.

I ultimately resorted to searching for the term "National Voter Registration Day" itself, leading me to this section of the website of an organisation I'd never heard of before either called 'BiteTheBallot' or 'Bite The Ballot' depending on whether you can figure out how to use a spacebar or not. According to the website, National Voter Registration Day is a "single day of action (5 February) to celebrate the importance of registering to vote" that was created by BiteTheBallot. Which is interesting because I have seen news reports claiming that the campaign (or whatever it is) was created by the Electoral Commission. Hmmm…

So it turned out that National Voter Registration Day had no significance whatsoever. Way to get people worried… Still, encouraging people to register to vote is a Good Thing™, although to accomplish that, promoting registration itself is probably a lot more effective than just confusing everyone and promoting a day that promotes registration.

Anyway, if you haven't registered yet, then please go do so.

In other news, it was kinda ridiculous earlier today seeing the BBC News Channel quoting Twitter CEO Dick Costolo out of context as saying that his company's own service "sucks", when in fact he really said, "we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years".