Internet users want to see Canadian Alliance Party Leader Stockwell Day change his first name to "Doris."
Published:
20 November 2000 y., Monday
Although there's still more than a week to go before Canada's federal election, early voting has made one thing perfectly clear: Internet users want to see Canadian Alliance Party Leader Stockwell Day change his first name to "Doris."
The vote in question is not the official balloting that takes place Nov. 27, but an online poll launched by satirical television show "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" and which was designed to poke fun at an Alliance Party platform that includes making it easier for citizens to spark nationwide referenda.
But what started as a TV-show gag has "taken on a life of its own," according to people at Salter Street Films, the Halifax, Nova Scotia, company that produces the "22 Minutes" show and on whose Web site is posted this proposed referendum question: "We demand that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris."
As of Friday afternoon, the number of "votes" in favor of the "Doris Day" referendum was climbing towards 700,000 and arriving at a rate of four or five a second. Unless the pace slows, the count will before election day reach a third of the head count expected to actually vote for the next government.
Salter Street spokesperson Deborah Carver told Newsbytes that voting on the
company's Web site has been snowballing all week, aided in part by Internet users forwarding and re-forwarding e-mail messages directing online friends to the site.
During a Nov. 13 broadcast of the show, comedian and "22 Minutes" co-star Rick Mercer announced the "Doris Day" poll, suggesting that an Alliance Party policy that could trigger a referendum with support for a question from a tiny minority of the population would allow anyone to spark a costly, nationwide vote.
One policy paper published by the Alliance - seen as well right of center for a Canadian political party but currently the country's official opposition party - put the referendum-trigger level at 3 percent of those who actually vote. Mercer said that would mean "any idiot" could launch a referendum just by collecting 350,000 votes.
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