Twitter: An Antidote to Election Day Woes?

By Nancy Scola and Allison Fine

We know. It sounds ridiculous at first. But it might not be as crazy as you think.

Why not? Well, here’s what we’re thinking. We all know that American elections can be messy affairs. As longtime online organizer Jon Pincus recently noted, “voter suppression relies to a large extent on information asymmetry.” That imbalance, if not corrected for, can create just enough hoops that discourage all but the most motivated among us from jumping through them on our way to voting. From voter caging to misleading fliers to faulty machinery to the long waits exacerbated by poorly trained poll workers, it’s often a lack of knowing that jams up the process.

And for far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there’s an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time.

Enter Twitter. In its few years of existence Twitter has proven amazingly adept at one thing: empowering its users to move around 140-character-or-less chunks around quickly and agilely. How Twitter is being used for political ends is constantly evolving. And while Twitter is easiest to use on the Web, it’s a one-to-one and one-to-many and many-to-many communications powerhouse available to anyone with a cell phone in his or her pocket. That’s powerful, potentially game-changing stuff.

We believe that Twitter can be instrumental in this election in correcting for some of the information imbalances that plagues American elections:

• Empowering Self-Organized Volunteers: Much of Twitter’s power comes from its simplicity. It’s inherently flexible. As problems pop up, as they do every election, volunteers and activists can organize on the fly to quickly get information out. A few weeks ago, college kids in Virginia’s Montgomery Country were startled to find a misleading notice telling them that voting in that state might jeopardize their student loans and scholarships. Chaos ensued. A second ominous notice from the county made things worse. Any enterprising young politico could have jumped into Twitter, created a @collegevoters account, and become the instant information hub.

• Sharing Patterns: As the saying goes, once is a fluke. Twice might be a coincidence. But three times is a pattern. Joe Voter might be mildly irked when his ballot is rejected for not matching up with the newly-mandated statewide voter databases. But it goes from irked to real problem when it’s happening to his neighbors in nearby precincts and counties. In Wisconsin recently, database troubles prevented election judges from voting during a test run. The state later suspended use of the database, but other states won’t find out there’s trouble until Election Day. Savvy volunteers watching the polls on election could tag Twitter posts with a pre-determined hashtag — #NJHAVAmatch, for example. Tracking that feed is an easy way to track the pattern of missteps and malfunctions.

• Serving as Mobile Legal Aide: On election day, questions arise. Should the local Republican/Democratic party bigwig really be sharing a cup of coffee and a donut with the chief election judge? How far back from the polls can we insist campaign pamphleteers stay? They’re asking anyone with a Hispanic last name for ID — is that okay? This is the time to call in the lawyers! Twitter can either work as a private chat line or a broadcast service. A volunteer with a sensitive inquiry about, say, a particular person’s case could “direct message” @DNClegal to ask for guidance. Someone wanting her question to @RNClegal to be heard (along with its answer) by anyone in his Twitter can simply make it public.

• Smart Routing Around Resource Gaps: When you wanted to know how long the lines were at New York City Apple stories during the release of new iPhone 3G, the Apple website, the place to go wasn’t the local TV new or CNN or even blogs — it was Twitter. In 2004, the uneven distribution of voting equipment that hampered voting in so many precincts in Ohio and elsewhere was compounded by the fact that voters tend to swarm, showing up at the polls at the same time. Ohio has started early voting this time around, but the lines are still sometimes long. On election day, Twitter can help monitor the wait times at polling places — information that clever local news outlets would well serve their audiences by then broadcasting out.

• Guiding the Watchdogs: Elections seem to run more smoothly when the eyes of the press are watching. During the recent protests around the Republican Convention in St. Paul, Twitter became a dispatch hub for activists, journalists, and support staff. In the midst of the chaos, news crews were having a tough time figuring out where to direct their attention. After Nathan Oyler, a.k.a. notq on Twitter, tweeted that medics gathered on a certain street corner were fearing arrest, News Hour with Jim Lehrer, one of the most respected shows in TV journalism, responded: “We’re sending someone now,” and then double-checked the address — all via Twitter.

There are obvious reasons why Twitter won’t work as an antidote to all of our election troubles. And there’s the ever-present risk of the Fail Whale making an appearance. That charming cartoon that alerted users to a downed system was far too familiar in the service’s early days. That said, Twitter has been markedly more stable in recent months. (Though not, alas, without problems.) And tens of millions of Americans will be casting ballots at over 200,000 polling places on November 4th, making the monitoring of events nationwide overwhelming.

However, there is an intersection of heavy voting registration (coinciding with large number of young voters) in battleground precincts in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina Ohio and Colorado where Twitter can best be put to use to direct Tweeters to specific information or actions in specific election districts.

So, let’s begin. To get the ball rolling, we’re suggesting one standardized format for hashtagging election protection tweets to use as voting registration is drawing to a close in most states and early voting is starting. It goes like this: [state] + [first four letters of the county] + [precinct, if known]. So, in downtown Cleveland, for example, the hashtag would be #OHCuya07. Of course, that format won’t work for every election problem. But we know the web can come up with something.

(Thanks to Jon Pincus, Slate’s Christopher Beam, The Progressive States Networks, and others for ideas and inspiration.)