Tonight is the night: elections! News addicts stay up all night to see the first results, but honestly I’ve had it with the media build-up until now. There’s nothing new being told so I think I’ll go to sleep like I usually do and by the time I get up the first results probably (hopefully) will be available. I might take a look at something I discovered thanks to @vincente’s tweet (hat tip) the Twitter vote report!
The idea is to monitor the entire election, by using twitter. Both presidential candidates have thousands of lawyers waiting to spread all over the country to detect any fraud. Twitter reports relies on the input of citizens. How long is the wait in Cleveland, Ohio? Are the new optical scan machines staying up and running in Palm Beach County, Florida? Is failure to bring ID to the polls thwarting first-time voters in Indianapolis?
Twitter Vote Report was inspired by a blog post on October 6th proposing the use of Twitter for election monitoring. In less than a month, volunteers across the country, with no other resources than their know-how and volunteer time, built www.twittervotereport.com to stream individual messages from Twitter and that will aggregate messages into maps and graphs. Voters will use Twitter and the code, or hashtag, #votereport on Election Day to report whether they had a long wait, or voting machines were faulty or if there were registration problems – or if everything went well.
This Twitter campaign is an ideal example of the combined power of social media and impassioned citizens to participate in democracy. Awesome tool!
Marketingfacts did a nice job listing some of social media tools used in the election, recommended reading!
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