Back to Voting Today

Took a quick break from the GiveList today to attend the Pew Center on Voting’s conference called Voting in America- The Road Ahead.

There was a really terrific lunchtime panel moderated by Pam Fessler of NPR with six state election officials and directors:  Robin Carnahan, Missouri, Trey Grayson, Kentucky, John Lindback, Oregon, Chris Thomas, Michigan, Brian Newby, Kansas and Warren Slocum of Mateo County, CA.

The most fun was hearing Lindback, who has been the leading administrator for that state’s conversation to all mail-in voting, ask, “Why do we keep doing what we have done?”  This was in the context of a discussion about voting registration.  Lindback fearlessly suggested that we should all have a number assigned to us when we are born as part of our birth certificate that has three purposes only:  for use as part of the census, for voting and to certify your death.  This idea was met with a surprisingly positively reaction from the crowd of mainly state election officials — and a cheer from me, of course!

There was a great deal of discussion of the need to unify voting procedures without federalizing them . Meaning getting all of the counties and all of their states to agree on a set method of voting – a Herculean task, but one worth undertaking.

Twitter Vote Report Wrap-Up

Wow, what a ride!  Dozens of volunteers contributing untold hours of their expertise and passion to bring an idea to life in less than a month.  We had nearly 300 news stories filed about the project the past week alone, many, many blog posts about it and thousands of tweeters using the system on Election Day.

The day wasn’t without its problems as the system went down for about a half an hour in the morning and the afternoon.  That was to be expected as we were building it at the same time we were rolling it out! The tech folks, particularly Deanna Zandt, Dave Troy and Andrew Turner were magnificent, calmer than I would have been and resilient throughout the day.

We’re still compiling the final statistics, so here are my impressions of the highlights of the day.

Just as importantly as serving as a vehicle for reporting problems, Twitter Vote Report was a wonderful way for citzens to celebrate voting.  There was a steady stream of tweets throughout the day of people celebrating their votes, like this one: “MeanRachel: #votereport #6th and Lamar – people laughing waiting for cross walk eating free ben and jerrys. Is this what hope looks like? Yes.”

Twitters informed one another:  “LisaS: line shorter now-stl 17th ward pct 5 voters, come on down! #votereport  less than a minute ago in Saint Louis, MO, USA  via Twitter 8:15 am”

And, of course, they reported problems, mainly long waits:  “geosteph: retweet neighbors who voted this morning said there was a long line at 6:10 AM …50 minutes before polls opened in MD #votereport”

Several messages were quite memorable both for the shocking disregard of voting rules, even common sense, by election officials, and the sincere desire of individual voters to try to make a difference by sending a message about it.

A St. Louis voter tweeted in the morning, during the course of what were five hour waits in some parts of St. Louis, this message, “In STL, poll workers shortstaffed, coming outside and asking random
people if anyone can help!  Poll workers require training. #votereport”  This bizarre request for untrained poll workers was included in an NPR roundup of Election Day troubles.

A woman sent in this audio file from her iphone (very cool!) reporting that she had been charged $20 to vote in Indiana.  I thought the poll tax was long gone, but apparently not.

It’s hard to express how appreciative I am of all of the people who invested themselves in this project; the tech folks, in particular, immersed themselves in building an extraordinary suite of tools that can be used for future campaigns and events, like natural disasters, when communications infrastructure between citizens becomes critically important.  We’re just at the beginning of what will be an ongoing, interesting evolution in the ways that mobile technology can be used to engage and connect citizens and I am very thankful that the Twitter Vote Report project could make an important contribution in that journey.

Election Day Is Here – Let’s Tweet!

What an amazing effort in the last few days from our volunteer programmers.  I can’t name them all, but you should take a peek at the list of contributors here on the Twitter Vote Report site. Already tweets are flying in this morning, here’s one from an early bird in Virginia:

#votereport #22033 currently 0520, polls open 0600, no more than 2 dozen people in front of us, more arriving as we wait. #good 18 minutes ago in Fairfax, VA 22033, USA via Twitter

Just yesterday we added an awesome list of longest wait times by zip code on the home page courtesy of Plodt.

State level maps, here is Missouri

The Google and Android apps are up and running

And Nathan Freitas yesterday grabbed the Twitter data stream and ran with it creating this a very cool way of displaying the data!

Already very long lines in Virginia this morning (but great weather expected in most of the country) sure hope folks brought folding chairs and are willing to wait hours because nothing is more important than voting today.

So, to my teammates, thanks for this great journey, and to the voters, thanks for your perseverance and resilience navigating a ridiculously difficult voting system — I’ll wait until later in the week to pontificate on how it needs to be fixed!

Twitter Vote Report in the News

Twitter Vote Report has caught fire with the mainstream media and the blogosphere.  Here are just a few of the highlights:

• An awesome video on Current TV:  http://current.com/contentItem.htm?masterId=85333400
• Andy Carvin, one of our gang who has helped to design and implement this effort, was interviewed on Weekend Edition on NPR.
• Noel Hidalgo created a terrific video that’s up on YouTube now:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUMXuTM_KLs
• Watching Democracy at Work, One Vote at a Time, Richard Waters, Financial Times’ FT Tech Blog, November 1, 2008
• Protecting Your Vote Using Net Technolgies, Craig Newmark, October 31, 2008

Nancy Scola is doing an amazing job of capturing all of this on the press page at www.twittervotereport.com.

Twitter Vote Report in Action

“So, what’s all this about?”  Some folks have been asking me that question in the past few weeks when I’ve told them about Twitter Vote Report. As of yesterday when the site went up, I can point to it and see, this is what it’s all about:

• “#votereport yesterday in #NC #28269 2.5 hr wait at library #early”
• “#votereport #early #89501 Downtown Reno Libarary 1 minute wait time”
• “#votereport #02128 #bad #reg I have not received my mail-in registration confirmation, and the MA phone number has been busy for a week!”
• “#votereport #60657 the electronic voting machines were awesome. showed you a paper receipt before finally casting your ballot.”
• “#votereport! I voted #early today in Arlington VA (#22201). Exp. was #good; #wait:30 min. I arrived at 8AM.”
• “My #early #votereport – absentee ballots in #48823 require extra postage. Don’t let a $0.15 slipup keep your voice from being heard!”

My favorite is the postage situation in North Carolina. I’ve asked my friend Cheryl Graeve, head of field operations at the National League of Women Voters to check that one out!

Dems Voting Via the Internet

I love the PoliTicker, the weekly newswire of Politics Online because it always has delicious tidbits that I’ve missed like this one, “Dems Hold 1st Global Online Primary”.

For the first time, Democrats living overseas can vote in a primary for president being held from February 5-12. According to this article, voters will have the choice of voting online, by mail or at polling places in 100 countries. Voters log into the system created by Everyone Counts, Inc. in San Diego, receive a unique identifying number and then vote.

So, rest of the election world, and I mean you, Secretaries of States, Election Assistance Commission, voting reformers, PAY ATTENTION!  The future of American democracy is right here in front of us, I just hope I don’t have to move to Estonia to practice it!

The Tragedy in Kenya, the Hope of Young Kenyans

Last month the people of Kenya voted for a president only to have the election overturned by a presidential commission and power retained in the hands of President Mwai Kibaki. There is more information on the disputed election from the Washington Post here, It’s not a new or intersting story, we’ve seen it before over and over again worldwide. Party in power refuses to give up power, voters feel betrayed and angry, and sadly in Kenya the dispute turned into ethnic fighting and killing around the country.
But here is the interesting story. The young people of Kenya have taken publicizing the violence around the country into their own hands. Nancy Scola has the amazing story here at WorldChanging. Nancy writes that in a country like Kenya where the press is a tool of the powerful elite, the opportunities to tell the stories of oppressed people are limited. A few weeks prior to the election Kibaki shut down all live radio and television broadcasts of the election. Home Internet access is prohibitively expensive for most Kenyans. What’s the answer? Cell phones. Almost all Kenyans have one and texting is extremely inexpensive unlike in the U.S.

One of the results of Kenyans texting news to one another is the website Ushahidi.com that is mapping violence across the country, city by city, incident by incident.

The efforts of Kenyan citizens to tell each other and the world their plight using their own mobile devices is awe inspiring. Despotism, violence, repression continue to plague the world, but the courage of citizens to capture and share their stories gives us hope that a new day of accountability is dawning.