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News from the Future of Public Media
Crowdsourcing poll-watching
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Oct 23, 2008 at 7:49 AM
As concerns about miscounted or undercounted votes have begun to swirl around, a number of groups are launching crowd-powered poll monitoring projects:
On Twitter, Andy Carvin from NPR notes that he’s testing out a tag—#votereport—that Twitterers can use to report voting irregularities. (UPDATE: More information on this effort—which will include a map featuring real-time tweets re. voting problems—here.)
Citizen journalism project The Uptake is planning to send reporters with live streaming camera phones to a number of battleground states to cover the polls for their Vote Chasers project. In this video they interview voters at crowded early voting sites in Florida.
SourceWatch has launched a nonpartisan Election Protection Wiki, which notes the states at the most risk for election tampering, and encourages users to collect and log incident reports from a variety of sources.
While normally voters would be relying on reporters to collate and publicize instances of vote suppression, these efforts bring a new set of eyes and ears into the mix. These are great examples of the public creating public media.
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