Commissioners ELECT not to post results
Friday, May 8th, 2009
By: Tom MacDonald
tmacdonald@whyy.org
The Philadelphia City Commissioners have decided not to put real-time election results on the Internet for the public in the primary election. But a lack of money has caused a hiatus in the program that started last year.
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The Philadelphia City Commissioners paid over a 350 thousand to set up a system to expand the restricted site for election results to the public for last November's election. Election supervisor Bob Lee says the old system which is available to the news media can only hold a few hundred users before crashing.
Lee: If you open it up to unrestricted access, it would bring down the site and interfere with the tabulation and no one would have results including the media to post on their public websites.
Dan Acklesberg was one of the people who requested to have the results made public.
Acklesberg: They're violating a promise from the city solicitor to hundreds of citizens. It's shameful and I hope they figure out something.
The Commissioners are offering bloggers and voter groups access to the election night numbers by just coming to the Board of Election headquarters.