My friend Nathan just sent an email around about an app he built that interface's with Twittervotereport which was built by volunteers in partnership with techPresident; it turns your phone into an on-the-spot volunteer election reporting mechanism. The aggregate effect will be to visualize reporting problems around the nation in real time. Election monitoring orgs have been dreaming about this for eons!! Here's the email from Nathan:
Just wanted to make sure y'all knew about this: http://twittervotereport.com
I built an app for the new G1/Android phone that uses your GPS location
to accurately track where you are reporting from:
http://openideals.com/2008/10/
Twitter Vote Report is an all-volunteer network of software developers,
designers, and other collaborators have teamed up with the award-winning
blog techPresident to launch this effort. The only resources
contributed to this project are the participants’ time and expertise!
Millions of Americans will be voting this Election Day. Many of these
voters will have terrific experiences and we’d love to hear about
those. But many voters will experience voting problems that we have
been hearing about for years: long lines, broken machines, and
registered voters who can’t vote because their names aren’t showing up
on the registration rolls. Using Twitter Vote Report, voters will be
able to share their experiences and resources with one another to solve
problems quickly (e.g. “don’t come now, the line is too long”). These
messages will then be aggregated and mapped so that we can “see” voting
problems around the country in real-time.
Spread the word!
Oh hey, i just found this press release in my email from Alison Fine, author of Momentum and apparently writing now at TechPresident.
Hey, friends, just three weeks to the day since Nancy Scola and I hatched the idea of using Twitter to report Election Day experiences and problems, this morning Twitter Vote Report (www.twittervotereport.com) we
Twitter Vote Reports enables individual voters to use their cell phones to report on their individual experiences – the good, bad and ugly. How long is the wait in Cleveland, Ohio? Are the new optical scan machines staying up and running in Palm Beach County, Florida? Is failure to bring ID to the polls thwarting first-time voters in Indianapolis? With Twitter Vote Report, we’ll know the answers to those questions straight from voters from all over the country. Using this system, voters can help one another to find the best time to go to the polls or find their new polling place, and we can also aggregate and map the messages to "see" in real time where the problem are for the election protection folks to do what they do best.
A large number of groups working on voter outreach and protection efforts have joined this effort. They include: the 866-OUR-VOTE (The Election Protection Coalition), Rock the Vote, Credo Mobile, Common Cause, Plodt.com, YouTube, twittervision.com, NPR's Social Media Desk, Independence Year Foundation, Center for Community Change, Student PIRGs, PBS, Women Donors Network, and Demos. A complete list of participating groups is on the website.
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