IEC website – the final word

It seems that the more you look at this story, the more jaw dropping it becomes… This will be my last mention of the matter, as I am bored of an organisation that refuses to listen when complaints are raised.

Needless to say, as I write this, I still cannot access the IEC website using my Firefox browser. If you think I am frustrated after first blogging about this just 5 days ago, let’s look at some other sources of information…

It would appear that this issue was first brought to the public’s attention on Tectonic on the 28th August 2008.

On the 1st September 2008, Aslam Raffee, Chair, OSS and Open Standards Working Group, Daniel Mashao, Chief Technical Officer of SITA and Helen King of The Shuttleworth Foundation laid a formal complaint about this digital discrimination with the South African Human Rights Commission.

Mr Raffee however notes in his blog entry of 1st September, where the full text of the complaint letter can be found, that “After we were not able to get a satisfactory response from the IEC, we have gone ahead and laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission.” In other words Mr Raffee had already tried a full process of correspondence with the IEC on this matter, and received no feedback.

You will hardly be surprised then to note Pamela Weaver’s comment at the bottom of his blog where she states, “I complained to the IEC about this more than a year ago and received no response.”

As mentioned before, there are a number of technical reasons for this type of programming and code in websites being unprofessional. However, the website also contravenes the South African government’s own approved “open source strategy” and published “Minimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems” government which commits government and its agents to open standards.

If the IEC is willing to ignore all these people, organisations and even the government when it comes to accessibility of information on their website, then what hope do we have of it ever being answerable to anyone for the more important tasks it is meant to perform?

IEC website only open to Internet Explorer users

With all the interesting things happening in South African poilitics just at the moment, I decided to check out the IEC (Independent Electoral Commission) website, to find out how our constitution might impact the date of the elections and when they can be called and how a new political party would have to register for the 2009 Elections.

To my absolute horror I was confronted by an error page, politely informing me that

"the current website is only compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer V4 (and upward) on the Windows operating system."

EXCUSE ME?
Is it not my constitutional and democratic right to use whatever browser I should choose, and to access their website with this piece of software?

It is not that they are unaware of the browsers... They polite me inform me that

"Our server detected that you are using a browser or operating system (e.g. Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome etc.) which is currently incompatible with our website."

I certainly hope that this is rectified in the VERY near future!

They do however still allow me (even with my Firefox browser) to check if I am registered to vote.

I just may not have much information about the election I am registered to vote in!