This week, how technology is changing voting in the coming federal election, Harry Potter gets a bit more added on, and some thoughts on the Star Wars Battlefront beta.

Technology and the Canadian federal election

I took advantage of the advance poll opportunity on the Thanksgiving weekend to exercise my right to vote, and the process is as low-fi as ever. I was handed a piece of paper and a tiny pencil. It was all I needed.

Technology isn’t yet impacting the way we cast our vote, but in this 2015 federal election, technology is certainly impacting how Canadians are deciding for whom to vote.

Social media and the Internet are making it more easy than ever for strategic voting to take place, and the “Anybody but Conservative” movement, also known by “Stop Harper”, is mobilizing.

In the last election, Harper and the Conservatives had just 39 percent of the popular vote, but because of the way our electoral system works, ended up with a majority and have been – in my opinion – running the country into an anti-science dark age.

We can’t change the system, but we can find ways to make it work to our advantage.

Vote Together and Strategic Voting are two sites that are tracking swing ridings and making recommendations on which candidates have the best chance to defeat the running Conservative.

And there are two organizations set up to manage vote swapping:

• Vote Swapping
• Voteswap Canada (Facebook page)

Vote swapping is a process by which two voters agree to vote for the other’s favoured party so each vote can keep Conservatives from winning seats.

If I want to vote Green, for example, but in my riding the Liberal has the best chance of beating the Conservative Candidate, then I agree to vote Liberal, while in another riding someone who would normally vote Liberal agrees to vote Green, because the Green candidate has the best chance of beating the Conservative.

And then there’s the Votes 4 Nudes initiative, which, upon receiving proof of you voting will send you a personalized nude photo. The initiative was started by a group of females who are anti-Harper, and lots of the (very NSFW) photos at the Tumblr site are, too. But organizers say they will send nudes to anyone who proves they voted, regardless of who they voted for. How democratic.

Get yourself a bit more Harry Potter

Seven books in J.K. Rowling’s series are being sold in Apple’s iBooks Store as enhanced editions, which include, according to Apple, “interactive animations and elaborate artwork bringing these beloved stories to life in a unique way. Harry Potter fans will also find annotations throughout their literary journey, written by the author herself.”

The books sell for only $11.99, and you can read them on iPads, iPhones, iPods, and even Mac computers.

You may have read the Harry Potter books, but you’ve never read them like this before.

Thoughts about Star Wars Battlefront after the beta

Well, I have to say that playing the Star Wars Battlefront beta sure made me feel like I was in a Star Wars movie. And the graphical fidelity of the game is unbelievable.

This weekend, as the beta was wrapping up, Electronic Arts announced details of the various modes that are coming when the game is released on November 17.

There are four missions that are playable by yourself or with a friend: Training, Survival, Battles, and Haro Battles, where you get to become Luke, Vader, and other iconic characters.

But Battlefront is built for multiplayer, and there are 9 different modes for groups of players ranging in size from 8 to 40 (including Fighter Squadron, the video for which is below).

While playing the beta, I got killed a lot in the multiplayer. It’s par for the course, but it gets frustrating. It’s not something I’m going to do a lot.

So if the only other thing to do in Battlefront is the missions, well, that’s really thin. There’s not a lot there. There certainly isn’t any narrative there. It’s just a big sandbox. Which is fine, for a while. But it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to have me wanting to play it every day.

More “This week in video games” at the Straight