Voting Problems? Here's the Newest Way to Report Them

Posted by Nancy Watzman, Politics West at 6:53 AM on October 30, 2008.

Tomorrow afternoon my husband and I are going to take our kids, ages four years and 18 months, with us when we go to cast our ballots early. I'm also going to take my iphone. My kids, because I cherish the memories of my parents taking me along when they voted when I was a kid. My iphone, because I'm going to "tweet," on twittervotereport.com, about any problems I may observe.

Twitter is a popular free social networking site where users "tweet" each other messages, no more than 140 characters apiece, about what they are doing at any given moment. You can use it to find out from your friends where the party is on Saturday night -- or in this case you can use it to report voter fraud.

Twitter Vote Report is a joint effort by a coalition of groups, including Rock the Vote, Election Protection, and techPresident, who are asking voters to "tweet" any problems they see and include the tag #votereport in their tweet. The folks at the project will then be able to aggregate and map these "tweets" so that problems around the country can be seen as they happen. The coalition members will then be able to relay this information to their teams who are monitoring the elections on the ground. You can read the full press release here.

If you haven't noticed, we are voting in a swing state where there has already been a lot of controversy over voting registrations. The Twitter Vote Project's experiment could make a real difference.

Tagged as: twitter, voting problems