The story also says that I reported the Lib Dems’ leaflets to the police as I suspected they may have broken electoral law. This is true. However, the police have recently informed me that having considered the matter and consulted the Electoral Commission they can see no offences being committed and therefore will be discontinuing their investigation.

While it seems that the Lib Dems’ leaflets are legal I maintain my original view that they are indecent, dishonest and untruthful. They may be “within the rules” but they are certainly outside anything I would recognise as honest politics. The leaflets distributed to every household in this borough by Paul Burstow and Tom Brake contain statements which are categorically untrue in the context of this election and which are likely to entirely mislead voters into switching their vote to not on the basis of being persuaded by a political argument but by a purely false tactical one.

I contacted the Lib Dems about my concerns shortly after writing my article on 15 May and the only response I have had was one from Sarah Ludford MEP (London region) saying that she finds no grounds for complaint. The Lib Dems have had ample opportunity to clarify, correct, withdraw or even substantially defend these leaflets but it would seem that they are entirely unwilling to discuss them seriously. While that is their right, the conclusion I draw from that is that the Lib Dems don’t want to defend their leaflets because they’re indefensible.

I would not like anyone to vote today thinking that there is any legal cloud over the Lib Dems in Sutton or elsewhere. But if you have formed the impression based on the Sutton Guardian story or anything I have written on this blog or elsewhere that the Lib Dems have been engaged in a deliberate attempt to steal votes from their opponents through deception I can confirm that that continues to be my honest assessment of the situation.

Today’s election for the European parliament isn’t a “close race” between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems in Sutton. There is no need to vote tactically for your second-choice party because you think that your first choice “can’t win in Sutton”. The European election system distributes seats roughly according to the percentage of votes for each party so that whether you support a major party or a minor one your vote will count towards electing a Euro MP and for many parties will have a very good chance of succeeding. If you live in Sutton, your vote will be added to all the other votes across the whole of London and used to elect 8 Euro MPs to represent the whole of London. There are no Euro MPs specifically for Sutton and the outcome of the vote in Sutton has no particular bearing on who gets elected other than in that Sutton’s votes comprise part of the London-wide total.

The most worrying aspect of this whole business was the conversation I had with a journalist who was quite adamant that “politicians lying isn’t a story”. While I question his news sense the sad fact remains that this is a common attitude among the public and leads to widespread voter apathy in which politicians’ claims are not only rightly not taken at face value but are frequently dismissed as outright lies without further consideration. The sorry conclusion of this story is that some politicians — in this case Paul Burstow, Tom Brake and other Lib Dems across the country — really will say anything to get elected, no matter how untrue it may be.

As the MPs’ expenses scandal continues there is a great deal of talk about changing the expenses system, the voting system and other aspects of our political life. While there may be some merit to some of these ideas, political reform in this country ultimately is in the hands of you, the voter, who can simply decide not to elect theives, fiddlers, liars or other kinds of rogues.

The polls are open until 10pm today. Your vote really does count. Use it.

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This isn’t a party political thing apart from the entirely obvious fact that I think the Lib Dems shouldn’t profit from their deceit at the ballot box in this election. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: If anyone has any leaflets from any other political party trying anything similar anywhere in the country please upload them to The Straight Choice and send me a link and I’ll see what I can do about publicising it if it hasn’t already gained coverage elsewhere.

Obviously no-one told the LibDems. Yesterday they launched their election campaign leaflets in London which stoop to new lows in lying to the public to trick them into voting LibDem.

Three leaflets that I’ve seen all use a similar tactic of exploiting voters’ ignorance of the European electoral system into fooling them into voting tactically as they might in a general election for the UK Parliament in Westminster.

The leaflet from Paul Burstow, LibDem MP for the south London constituency of Sutton and Cheam, is typical.

“It’s so close here” declares the headline. “Elections in Sutton and Cheam are always a close finish between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives.” To the side is a big bar chart showing the LibDems with 47%, Conservatives on 41% and Labour with just 12%. “Here in Sutton and Cheam, elections are between the LibDems and the Conservatives”, a callout box reminds us.

It doesn’t say where these figures come from or give any indication as to why they might be relevant. And the fact is, they’re not just irrelevant but totally misleading. This is the result of the last general election for Westminster where the vote was indeed a close race between the LibDems and the Tories, with Labour trailing a poor third and unlikely ever to take the seat under Westminster’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

What the leaflet doesn’t say is that the electoral system for the European Parliament is totally different and there’s no need for anyone to vote tactically no matter which party they support.

The European election on 4th June isn’t an election “in Sutton and Cheam”. The Euro vote is grouped into large regions which return several Euro MPs each and the system uses a form of proportional representation, ensuring that very few votes are “wasted” on failed candidates that don’t get elected.

Sutton and Cheam voters will have their votes pooled together with all other Londoners and used to elect eight Euro MPs. It doesn’t make the slightest difference how close the vote may be between two parties in any Westminster constituency. People will be voting for a party and not a candidate and any party that gets around 8% of the total vote across the whole of London will get at least one Euro MP.

In the last Euro election in 2004, the LibDems didn’t come first but third. The Tories and Labour both took 3 seats in London each. The LibDems, the UK Independence Party and the Greens took one Euro MP each. And the LibDems’ vote at 15% across London trailed well behind Labour on 25%. So why aren’t the LibDems showing the figures that matter from the last Euro election rather than the ones from Westminster that have no significance at all?

The leaflet from Tom Brake, LibDem MP for Carshalton and Wallington in south London, takes the same trick to even more sordid depths.

We get a misleading bar chart similar to Paul Burstow’s, showing the Westminster constituency vote from the last general election. Here, as in Sutton and Cheam, the Westminster vote is close between the LibDems and the Tories with Labour coming a very distant unelectable third.

But the language of deceit here is even stronger. “This election is going to be a tight contest and every vote will make a difference… With Labour out of the race in Sutton, more and more people are backing the Liberal Democrats to win.”

Did you see what they did there? “Labour out of the race in Sutton”? It’s not a Sutton race, it’s a London race, and in that London race Labour are still in a stronger position than the LibDems even despite the floundering government in Westminster.

And what does it mean that “people are backing the Liberal Democrats to win”? This isn’t a winner-takes-all election like we have for Westminster. All the three big parties are likely to get at least one Euro MP out of eight in London and it’s very likely that smaller parties like the Greens and UKIP won’t come away empty-handed. The real question is whether the LibDems will be able to increase their single current London Euro MP to two or whether large chunks of their vote will get skimmed off at the top by a strong Tory party and at the bottom by people voting for smaller parties like the Greens and UKIP through genuine preference or as a protest against Westminster’s dirty politics.

The theme continues with more lies elsewhere on the leaflet. In a section attacking Labour we’re told that “Labour cannot win in Sutton… voting Labour will only help the Conservatives win”.

Excuse me? This is a proportional representation election. Voting Labour won’t help the Conservatives. It’ll help Labour. And once again the entirely misleading idea of whether anyone might “win in Sutton” totally obscures the relevant matter of London-wide voting.

The Greens get the same treatment. “The Greens have no chance of winning in Sutton”, the leaflet says. Well, in the last Euro election in 2004 the Greens picked up 8% of the London vote, giving them a single Euro MP just like the LibDems. Things will be a little harder for the Greens this time in London as there will now be only eight London Euro MPs compared with the previous nine, but the Greens are still in with a fighting chance. The LibDems’ leaflet is a shamefaced attempt to con Green voters into considering a “tactical” vote for another party even though they have no need to do so. In the Euro election, every vote really does count. Need I say again that it matters not one bit who might “win in Sutton” in this London-wide vote?

The LibDems’ lying leaflets aren’t just a south London phenomenon. Up in Camden, LibDem leaflets in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency use the familiar Westminster general election bar chart to show just how “close” things are between the LibDems and Labour there. In this case it does at least say that these are “general election” results but the complete irrelevance of them is not made clear. In fact, the Tories’ bar is marked with a big box that says, “Can’t win here” — once again trying to trick people into making a choice between the LibDems and Labour and giving up a potential Tory vote as futile. This is bait and switch. It’s no different to a financial adviser showing a client a set of performance figures for one investment while actually selling them another. The text continues the same theme: “Elections here in Holborn and St Pancras are always a close finish between your LibDem team and Gordon Brown’s Labour Party.” This is an outright lie: In the 2004 Euro election the LibDems in “Holborn and St Pancras” (really, the London region) came a distant third to the Tories and Labour.

I’ve been studying and following politics for 25 years and I’m well aware that election leaflets aren’t written under a solemn oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Depending on your affection for the party concerned, election handouts are either good public relations or evil propaganda, designed to put themselves in the best possible light and their opponents in the worst. A party or candidate’s own successes will be amplified and their shortcomings quietly sidestepped. Opponents will be lambasted for the slightest misjudgements and their genuine triumphs ignored. That’s how it goes and it’s hard to imagine that in a vigorous, healthy and above all a free democracy it could ever be much else.

But these LibDem leaflets go way beyond legitimate criticism of their opponents and into tricking the voters to abandon an opposing vote by giving the wholly false impression that there’s a need to vote tactically in the Euro election. That it’s the LibDems doing this — a party that campaigns hard to introduce proportional representation for the Westminster parliament as a supposedly “fairer” system — makes it all the more appalling. PR would give the LibDems a big boost at Westminster, but in an election where PR is already in place and doesn’t appear to work to their advantage in some areas the LibDems try to con the public into understanding less about how their vote works than if they hadn’t read the leaflet at all.

So I’m calling them on it. This isn’t politics but a subtle and insidious form of electoral fraud. These leaflets are deliberately designed to deceive, making statements that the LibDems know will be misinterpreted by almost everyone. The LibDems have been relatively unscathed by the Westminster expenses scandal. If nothing else they have far fewer MPs there to be making claims. But frankly I’d much rather a few LibDems had been caught feathering their own nests than deliberately trying to subvert democracy as they’re doing here. Sarah Ludford MEP, Paul Burstow MP, Tom Brake MP and the LibDems in Holborn and St Pancras have shown themselves completely unable to tell the truth where it counts and therefore unfit to hold public office — and I’ll say exactly the same thing for any party that tries to exploit and increase voters’ ignorance of the electoral system for their own advantage in this way.

There’s no need to vote tactically in the Euro elections on 4th June. Just vote for the party you prefer and there’s every chance you’ll help to elect at least one Euro MP for them. Don’t let the LibDems or anyone else fool you into thinking otherwise.

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With thanks to all the people that have uploaded their election leaflets to The Straight Choice and to the Straight Choice team for making the whole thing possible.

(Click on the image to download the PDF, 19KB, opens in new window/tab.)

Like this? Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/adrianshort

I’m a self-confessed and unashamed news junkie and this is how I’m starting to mash up news in my local area. For those that aren’t local, Sutton is a London borough with a population of approximately 180,000. Stonecot Hill is a neighbourhood within Sutton with a population of a few thousand.

Here’s how it all works.

Sources (green boxes)

I write Stonecot Hill News which is a local news blog running as a standalone WordPress installation on its own server. It produces an RSS 2.0 feed which here is treated as an outbound API.

Paul Burstow is the local member of parliament (constituency: Sutton & Cheam). Paul posts news regularly to his website and for many years that site has been serving an RSS 1.0 (RDF) feed. Whether he realises it or not, Paul laid one of the first foundations for news mashability in the borough.

The Sutton Guardian is the local newspaper, published by Newsquest. Together with its sister titles in other areas, they publish several dozen RSS 2.0 feeds for a wide variety of content.

Sutton Council is the local authority for the borough. Despite a recent £270,000 revamp to their website they haven’t yet managed to step into the Twenty-First and produce any RSS feeds. However, they do publish a variety of content regularly on their website, including their press releases.

APIs (grey boxes)

For the non-technical: API stands for Application Programming Interface, but that doesn’t tell you very much. Think of APIs like connectors or adapters that allow one program to plug into another in the same way that our household appliances can all connect to the electrical network because they share common plugs and sockets.

An API may be inbound (allowing data to be put into an application), outbound (allowing data to be extracted) or both.

As we can see in the diagram, applications which use APIs can be daisy-chained together, with the output of one application being fed into another.

RSS and Atom feeds are also APIs in that they provide a structured way for a program to get data out of an application. These feed formats are simple to implement (many applications produce them automatically) and are the first thing to consider when implementing a simple outbound API for an application.

Mashers (pink boxes)

Mashers are small programs that connect otherwise incompatible inbound and outbound APIs together. TwitterFeed is a simple example. Say you want to automatically post the new items from your blog to your Twitter account. Your blog serves an RSS feed but Twitter, while it has an inbound API, cannot accept RSS directly as input. TwitterFeed links the two, allowing the user to define any number of RSS feeds as inputs and any number of Twitter accounts as outputs, via the Twitter API. In this way, TwitterFeed plugs blogs into Twitter.

Yahoo! Pipes is a much more sophisticated and flexible masher. It can take inputs from a variety of sources (RSS, Atom, CSV, Flickr API, Google Base or even raw web pages), sort, filter and combine them in every conceivable way, and output the results as a single stream in various formats (RSS, JSON, and KML, the geo-format used by Google Earth). For my mashup I created this pipe to filter Paul Burstow’s, the Sutton Guardian’s and Sutton Council’s news and only pass through items containing the word “stonecot” to the stream that eventually ends in the @stonecothill Twitter feed, which is just for Stonecot Hill residents. The number of items coming through these sources about Stonecot Hill is very low, but when something appears residents will want to see it. (By way of example, only a single press release from Sutton Council in the last 227 concerns the Stonecot Hill area specifically.)

As mentioned above, Sutton Council doesn’t provide an RSS feed or any other kind of outbound API for its press release. I wrote a screen scraper in Ruby (using Hpricot) that grabs the press releases directly from the council website, dumps them into a MySQL database and pushes new items into the Delicious API. I’ve used Delicious here for two reasons. Firstly, because it generates an RSS feed automatically from all the items posted to it, so I can easily connect this output to other mashers and APIs further downstream without having to generate and host an RSS feed myself. Also, Delicious provides a useful search facility on its website allowing me to easily search just the press releases from Sutton Council. This isn’t possible with the council’s own website, where searches are scoped to the entire site.

Destinations (orange boxes)

In my diagram, the destinations are sites and services which represent new ways of consuming information coming from the original sources. Don’t want to read Sutton Council’s press releases on their own website? You can folllow them in Delicious or on Twitter. Want to keep up with the latest news about Stonecot Hill? Again, the @stonecothill Twitter account can find this for you from various sources. I also add my own items to @stonecothill, making it a unique mashup of original and syndicated content that’s highly targeted and very local.

The information stream doesn’t need to end with these destinations. Any destination that provides an outbound API can simply be another link in the chain to downstream services. In my diagram, the RSS feed from Delicious is used to do just that, pushing all its content on to the @suttonboro Twitter account, and just the Stonecot Hill-related content on to the @stonecothill account via the Yahoo! Pipes filter. Twitter has its own specific outbound API and also serves RSS feeds. There’s nothing to stop anyone else building on these destinations by combining and filtering them with other sources to produce their own unique, relevant information streams that they find useful.

What next?

If you run a website, it’s time to start thinking of mashability with the same degree of seriousness as you treat human visitors. Your website needs to serve up feeds and APIs so that other programs can connect to your content and deliver it to people in ways and contexts that they find useful. Some of these may have an audience of thousands or even millions. Others may have an audience of one. Regardless, by providing an API to your content you enable others to build things that you haven’t imagined, don’t have the resources or desire to build yourself, and won’t have to maintain. Businesses like newspapers that survive by selling their content (or selling advertising around their content) are thinking very carefully about the challenges and opportunities for the future of their industries. For government and voluntary organisations, it’s time to start thinking more like evangelists than economists. Spread the word like the free Bibles in hotel bedrooms and take every opportunity to get your message out there.

Sutton Council have been encouraged in various ways to implement feeds on their own website and the song will remain the same until they do. I don’t want to maintain my scraper for ever and I certainly don’t want to build any more of them.

The whole API and mashability agenda is far bigger than simple web feed formats like RSS and Atom. It’s time for technologists to stop flogging the line that “RSS is an easy way for people who follow lots of websites to read all their news in one place”. Direct human consumption of RSS feeds is never going to hit the mainstream in that way. If you’re reading this, you’re far more likely that average to use an RSS reader. (I’ve got 86 feeds in my Google Reader right now). The average web user has barely heard of the concept and most definitely don’t do it. I suspect they never will. But it’s likely they’re already benefiting from syndicated content through sites and applications that they use. If they never have to see or care about the underlying technology that’s really no more a problem than worrying that the average web user doesn’t understand HTTP or DNS. It’s just plumbing that can stay out of sight and out of mind as long as it works.

For the minority that do use personal RSS readers, I’d like to see more of them with built-in filtering features. Setting a simple keyword filter on a feed makes RSS reading considerably more powerful.

For those serving up feeds, I’d like to see Atom more widely used. Without wanting to open a can of Wineresque worms, RSS 2.0 fudges a number of important issues around content semantics and provides no support whatsoever for correctly attributing items in feeds mashed from several sources. Atom was designed to solve these problems and it does. Let’s use it.

Lastly, mashability is about every conceivable kind of content and content type. It’s not just about news and text. Every stream of information should have its own machine-readable feed. Every system that can accept data from human input should implement an inbound API to do likewise. To take one example, FixMyStreet is a website for people to report street faults to local authorities and currently takes around 1000 reports a week. It even has its own iPhone application so people can report faults complete with GPS locations and photos directly from the street. Only a single local authority in over 400 has implemented an inbound API to receive these reports. The rest get them by email, which must be manually copied into their own databases with all the effort, expense, possibility for error and opportunity costs that represents. Third-parties building extensions to other people’s systems is no longer unusual, so organisations need to embrace the possibilities rather than fighting against it or standing around looking bemused.

It’s time to open the doors and windows and get the web joined up, mashed up and moving.