If you don't care about politics but are interested in information technology, you might be curious about what just happened last Sunday, when french people were electing their new president. I'm myself from Belgium, a small country north of France, and french-speaking as about 45% of the country. A fun fact is that everybody here knows about elections in France, but almost no one knows legislative elections will occur in Belgium in June ... no wonder Belgium is known for its taste for surrealism.
Ok, I come to my point.
In France, you can't publicly communicate partial results until 20h, that is when all polling stations are closed and bulletins counted in all/most of them. This is a democratic measure indeed ; your vote still count even if you're coming late to the polling station and the result is already 99.999% sure. What's the point being in the waiting line if you hear a radio saying who's going to win ?
So, french papers and TV know partial results ( mostly thanks to "real-time" surveys, I guess ) but can't communicate about it. So are french blogs or any other mean, indeed.
That law is only active in France. That means Belgian and Swiss journalists know the results and indeed communicate about it inside their own country. And on the web.
The three main french-speaking Belgian papers are le soir, la libre belgique and la dernière heure. Guess what, partial results were available on their front page all the day, and their servers were badly overloaded ( several minutes to get a single html file, with all other content than the election results removed ). Assuredly most requests were coming from France ... ain't ironic ?
Meanwhile, French bloggers were providing real-time results as being water content in air.
This is all ridiculous. This law makes sense to me, but is no more applicable. And I doubt any international/European law or agreement could happen to prevent this. What you would you do ?