It seems as if everyone is rolling out interesting bits of political technology as Election Day approaches. Here are some of the more intriguing examples I’ve come across in the last few days; feel free to add your own to the list by adding a comment.
–First up is VoterStory.org, a distributed web “widget” to help record and gather individual voter problems experienced on Election Day. Anyone can add this tool to their website by adding a bit of code to their header, and all information they collect will be automatically referred to voter protection organizations for investigation.
It was developed by Rob Stuart and his company, EvolveStrategies, with funding from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. Those foundations have long been involved in supporting nonpartisan voter protection hotlines and legal work, so it’s very smart of them to invest in extending their information gathering network to the web.
Personally, I would have liked to see this tool also give users the option to share their story with the world, or at least with the website where they input their information, so that more people could see firsthand what allegedly goes on on Election Day.
–Working in a similar vein is Video the Vote, which is an effort to get citizen videographers to document election day problems as they occur. I have to admit a certain amount of skepticism about this, mainly because I remember very similar efforts in 2004 to get people to expose voter suppression and other hanky-panky in real-time, and we all know how that played out. But YouTube and other videosharing sites didn’t exist in 2004; neither did giant social networks that have proven incredibly efficient at propelling compelling snippets of video onto millions of screens and inboxes. So maybe this is the year that bottom-up watchers, souveillance, will come to the fore. Video the Vote was created by Ian Inaba of the Guerrilla News Network, John Ennis of Shoot First, and James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org. They are trying to sign up volunteers all over the country and plan to alert people to respond to reports of irregularities in real time.
–Last on the theme of voter protection is an effort led by Working Assets to sign up volunteers to receive urgent text messages if their help is needed to focus attention on local election officials, in the event that poll openings are delayed or not enough machines are delivered or to act as witnesses. Their Voter Protection Immediate Response Network claims more than 5000 mobile activists have signed up as of Friday afternoon; it will be interesting to see if they get deployed and what impact they have.
–On a somewhat related theme comes the Polling Place Photo Project, which calls itself “a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action.” It is part of Design for Democracy, an initiative of AIGA, the professional association for design. William Drenttel of Design Observer initiated the project, working in collaboration with Jay Rosen, founder of NewAssignment.Net (which, full disclosure, I am advisor to). They are especially looking for information of what works and what can be improved. They’ve built a simple submission form on their site where anyone can upload photos with some identifying information. This is a good simple idea, though honestly I don’t understand why they aren’t just asking people to post photos to Flickr with a common tag–say, PollingPlace06–and some identifying comments.
–FaithfulAmerica has just unfurled a different bit of political technology–they’re inviting people to leave a short voice message for President Bush, suggesting to him what his priorities should be for the last two years of his term in office. They promise to share these “Dear Mr. President” recordings–made with Evoca–on their site and to also include the best ones in a series of CDs they will deliver to the White House. “Speak from the heart,” they say. The site is a project of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.
–Last but not least, my buddies at the Sunlight Foundation (where I have been doing a lot of strategic consulting on an ongoing basis for the last year and forward), have unveiled a handy new tool. It’s called Watchdogging101, an interactive website that will help citizens who want to answer the most basic questions about their elected representatives, but don’t know how to navigate the many useful databases that are out there. Written by veteran money-in-politics analyst Larry Makinson, the site covers questions like “How much are my representatives worth?”, “How much did Company X give to Representative Y?,” “Where can I check to see if someone’s a lobbyist?”, “What is Candidate X spending his money on?,” and “How does my representative compare with others in terms of money raised from Industry X?” You can also post a question and Larry promises to post his answer within 48 hours.
[UPDATE] Starting at 6:00am sharp, Protect Our Votes will be on the lookout for Election Day voting violations. Their mission is “to highlight the most serious violations as soon as they are discovered and to place them immediately in context for journalists along with all available trusted documentation.” Unless violations are reported immediately, there is little chance that they will become stories, so the site is urging voters who witness violations to report them immediately. The site is paid for by MoveOn.org Political Action.Technorati Tags: Evoca, EvolveStrategies, FaithfulAmerica, NewAssignment.net, puppy, Rob Stuart, Sunlight Foundation, voter protection, VoterStory.org, Watchdogging101