Paul's Web Space 2.1

Document the Vote 2008

With so many questions raised about the results of recent Presidential elections, along with the charges of "voter fraud" and counter-charges of vote suppression, it's really true that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." Luckily, there are more, better funded and organized, efforts every election cycle to encourage, enable, and publicize the monitoring of the election process along with any potential issues with access to and accuracy of the act of voting.

First I'll highlight the multimedia efforts. Video the Vote was started in 2006 by video journalists and documentarians, who, after watching what they considered to be egregious examples of voter suppression and election irregularities during the 2000 and 2004 election, vowed to use video technology in a attempt to document such irregularities in future elections. This is the first Presidential election to be covered.

From a more purely journalistic perspective, the New York Times has launched a citizen journalism initiative called the Polling Place Photo Project. While less overtly aimed at ensuring fair elections, this project nonetheless encourages more openness, and thus potentially exposes or deters acts that infringe on the exercise of the democratic process.


One of the coolest social media efforts going on is the Twitter Vote Report. Check out this short video tutorial, and report to twitter anything you observe regarding vote supression, long waits, problems you observe at polling places, etc. Use the Twitter hashtag #votereport and your tweet will be aggregated into their data collection system, with results displayed in real time and aggregated on a map and in a database. Follow this effort on Twitter.

In the typical everyone-pitches-in volunteer wiki fashion, another effort is the Voter Suppression Wiki, spearheaded by a small team of volunteers, hooked into and publicizing all the more organized efforts while providing the dedicated social media volunteers a place to pitch in.

One other new project I want to mention is Who Voted, which endeavors to show which registered voters actually cast their votes, providing another data point for analyzing elections retrospectively. Unfortunately only four states are tracked so far — for a variety of reasons, including the cost or availability of these records. This site was just launched by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) and funded by Google's Summer of Code program.


Finally, be sure to check out Our Vote Live to follow the election protection efforts tracked by all of these efforts and through people calling the universal 1-800-OUR-VOTE election protection hotline. It will be updated throughout the day (and the entire election season, as long as necessary), and you can follow up-to-the-minute reports on the Our Vote Live Blog. The site was set up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for the Election Protection Coalition. Follow them on Twitter too.

Labels: election protection, politics, votereport, voting technology

   Link: http://www.ourvotelive.org/

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