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My old pal Peter Rukavina runs a company on Prince Edward Island called Reinvented, Inc. They do websites and stuff.

This year he landed the job to publish the PEI provincial election results online in real time on election day. Sounds fine, except that election day this year coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Juan to PEI which knocked out power, servers, polling booths and governement offices.

Did this deter the hardy Islanders from boldly forging on? Not on your life. Over 80% of them voted. All the talk about election weirdness from the bastion of democracy to the south, what with hanging chads, Supreme Court rulings and invalid voting machines seems strangely indulgent when you read Peter’s log of the part he played in PEI’s efforts to hold a successful provincial election in a hurricane.

Peter’s daily log, starting at 2:00am, just before the eye of the hurricane arrived takes you through the whole day of workarounds, patches and fixes to ensure that people first of all knew where to vote and then later could have access to the results. The log ends just before midnight, as Peter crawls into bed, after just another day of democracy in the face of disaster.

Why aren’t Prince Edward Islanders helping Iraq get their government up and running?