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No. 3205:

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/postcard/?comic=3205

Reassembled from partial quotes in archived forum messages by: David Morgan-Mar

The author writes:

You can enrol to vote in the upcoming Equatorial Guinean presidential election by filling out the web form to sign up for the Postcard discussion forums.

This seems to be an unintended side effect of the forum plug-in to handle user polls that I downloaded from Github. It's a slightly unusual package, developed by a guy in Equatorial Guinea, but it fulfils my needs nicely. I guess he works in their electoral office and used the same code to handle the pre-poll and postal voting stuff for the election. There was a strange toggle in the code I downloaded, which was named "ENABLE_VOTING" and set to FALSE by default, so naturally I changed it to TRUE.

Next thing I knew, I was receiving emailed updates from the Equatorial Guinean electoral office indicating that all the forum users were now registered to vote. I tried contacting the government there to sort out the mess, but my Spanish wasn't good enough to explain the problem. I tried changing the toggle to FALSE, but then my forum polls wouldn't work, so I changed it back.

So, well, if you want to exercise your new democratic power, I ask only that you do some research and get to know the candidates and issues first. As a newly appointed Equatorial Guinean electoral official, I shall refrain from expressing my own opinions in a public forum.