Vote for the Matterhorn!
September 29, 2011, 5 Comments
It’s election time, and not just in Switzerland. The online vote for the official list of the new Seven Wonders of Nature is underway and the Matterhorn is one of the 28 finalists. It’s up against some very stiff competition – the Grand Canyon, Uluru, the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef – but there are seven winners in this race (rather like the vote for the Federal Council in Switzerland!). Voting takes a couple of minutes and can be done in a host of languages. All you have to do go to the website and click on your seven choices. That’s it.
Four years ago the official new Seven Wonders of the World were picked by over 100 million voters worldwide. Nothing Swiss even managed to make it into the final, but then Switzerland doesn’t really have any world-famous monuments that could compete with the eventual winners: the Colosseum, Rio’s statue of Christ, the Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, Petra, and Chichen Itza. But when it comes to natural wonders, Switzerland is surely in the running. I found it easy to pick seven Swiss candidates in this post last year – Seven Natural Wonders of Switzerland – including the Matterhorn, of course.
The deadline for voting is 11 November – 11.11.11 – so there’s still plenty of time for you to spread the word. Tell your friends and family, use the buttons below to put it on your Facebook page or Twitter, in fact do whatever it takes to help the Matterhorn (or Il Cervino, as it’s known in Italian) get picked. If you need more information about the famous mountain, this short post from my Swiss trivia series last year might help.
So what are you waiting for go and vote!
Follow on Facebook
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe by RSS
Contact me directly
Global Solutions Inc.
5 Comments on "Vote for the Matterhorn!"
I came across your post on the way home from Zermatt… Voting for the Matterhorn was a no-brainer, plus I added a number of lesser known wonders to increase the chances for the ultimate Gipfeli! 🙂
“All you have to do go to the website and click on your seven choices” – well, if this were the case, I would have voted. But in fact, this isn’t all – they want me to register in order to be able to vote, and they don’t just want to know my e-mail address AND full name, but also my gender, exact date of birth, country of residence, AND I have to agree to some very lengthy Terms and Conditions I’m not going to read – that’s too much for me. I’m starting to feel really fed up with the countless website registrations I already had to fill out; of course I could fill in bogus data, but I just have enough. Another registration just to vote for the Matterhorn? No. Enough is enough.
Sadly Patrick all that is necesssary because most people voting are not Swiss – that means the organisers had to introduce some way of preventing people from cheating and voting multiple times. No-one in Switzerland would ever do such a thing but others might.
The form is not preventing anything, as you could fill in arbitrary bogus information with the exception of the e-mail address, which needs to be a working one, as it seems. So, why not require the e-mail only? And anyway there are many services where you can get as many throwaway e-mail addresses (that work for an hour or so) as you want, although I think they could filter the known ones out. It’s still more time-consuming to get several throwaway e-mail addresses and to register using them than to fill in bogus personal data, which you always could, so I just don’t see why they would need this. Gender and date of birth just don’t help to prevent cheating. Probably they want statistical data about the voters.
Milford Sound got my vote too. But we each had seven to distribute so more than enough for CH and NZ