Another Election Time
Tokyo assembly election has officially started last Friday, and we started to see candidates placing posters since then. The election outcome is considered very significant as it would most likely determine the timing of the national election which many presume that DLP, the party in opposition to take over.
Apart from manifestos and parties each candidate belong to, I could not help noticing that many only had a simple URL: QR barcodes, which occupied a corner of every poster in earlier elections, were not used. For instance, out of eight candidates for the Shinjuku district, there was only one with that familiar black and white square.
This is only my assumption, but there has been some discussions about the QR code for some time. Reading QR code with a camera phone is easy and accurate, but apart from saving the effort from typing URLs, it did not substantially change the experience.
In addition, in elections’ case, URLs with candidates names on, is good enough. The Japanese voting system is very basic, and each voter has to write down the candidate’s name on a piece of paper. Voters should at least be aware of candidate’s names, which in most cases match with the URLs they are using to promote themselves.
Ultimately Suica and other touch experience really hightens the expectation for easy, accurate, and quick user interactions, and perhaps QR code has already been considered too clumsy. It would be interesting to see, perhaps in a next election, what technologies we would see around these posters.
The election will take place on July 12th. Meanwhile, as I would be away from Tokyo during the time, have already cast my vote. I just brought the voter’s card they sent at home (image below), the election staff read the barcode from the card and that was it. Again, I was amazed to see the amount of trust the system puts on home address.
