Before, if lines were long or there was voter intimidation going on at the polls, very little was done to record it in real time. With so much happening on election day, local news affiliates may be unwilling to respond to a phone call placed by a voter, or they may feel it’s just how it is and wait for hours or leave.

Now, with Twitter and YouTube, there will be real time recordings of what is going on at the polls, making it so problems, discrepancies, and fraud go documented at the very least.

Many volunteers will stick at the polls and record video of there is any intimidation. For example, sometimes there are uniformed officers that hang out near the polls in poorer areas, making potential voters afraid to vote. This year, any such instances will likely be caught on camera and/or Tweeted, at least exposing injustice if not preventing it.

There’s a lot of talk of touch screen voting machines going haywire during early voting. Once again, people will be able to record such instances and get them out there.

Twitter’s main resource is Twitter Vote Report. If you tweet with a #votereport included, it will go straight to Twitter’s vote report site. But they are offering many other text commands (copied from the Vote Report site):

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. “L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC”
• #machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”#wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”#early if you’re voting before November 4th#good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience#EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

If you don’t have Twitter on your phone and want to report something, simply text message 66937 and start the message with #votereport, and it will be recorded.

Additionally, there will be a chart that measure wait time nationally based on entries into Twitter. Find it here.

Increasingly, it looks like the election may be decided in Pennsylvania. The polls are narrowing a bit and McCain is putting in a lot of time there. It’s hard to see Obama losing if he wins Pennsylvania, but it would be much more difficult for him to win without it. Hopefully, the cameras and the Tweeters will be out en masse there so no funny business taints the election.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 3:56 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.