Election 2008 Greatest Hits
I compiled a greatest hits highlights reel of some of the key moments in the campaign. Enjoy.
Science Addiction
A dormant blog by Devanshu Mehta
Tag: election2008
November 6, 2008
Change Watch: Change.gov
Until inauguration day on the 20th of January, I will be covering some of the aspects of the transition to the Obama administration that affect technology and open government in a series called Change Watch. 
Today, Change.gov was launched. It is the official web site for the “Office of the President-Elect”. It is an extremely forward-looking web site which hopes to capture the enthusiasm and energy of Obamamania before is subsides. The site continues where BarackObama.com left off- except for the user participation part. One hopes that there is a direct way for citizens to participate. Maybe Joe Trippi’s MyWhiteHouse.gov idea?
UPDATE: Alan Rosenblatt at techPresident has a couple of great ideas about how the new President can keep the Obama social network alive- either as an independent community outside of government or as a “white house social network” to directly channel the energy of his supporters.
November 4, 2008
Watch Vote Reports From All Over the Country
I’ve been a bit involved with Twitter Vote Report and it is a lot of fun to watch people reporting their voting experiences. I’m helping out with reviewing the reports and some of them are just heart wrenching. (refresh or go to the main site for the latest reports).
October 22, 2008
Block the Vote
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast have a great article on voter suppression tactics at Rolling Stone:
These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.
October 22, 2008
Twitter Vote Report Ramping Up
I have already written about it, but the Twitter Vote Report project is picking up steam, with a lot of highly talented individuals and organizations involved. The idea is to:
As news outlets and blogs will report on Election Day stories, we are building an invaluable resource for thousands of voters to get immediate help. From questions like “where do I vote” or “how do I make sure that my rights are being upheld,” Twitter Voter Report augments these efforts by providing a new way for voters to send text messages (aka tweets) via cellphones or computers which will be aggregated and mapped so that everyone can see the Nation’s voting problems in real-time.
You can help:
- Join the Google Group and contribute.
- Help out on the Wiki.
- Join the nationwide coding jam on Friday, October 24th.
Right now, you can help out by adding to this set of dummy test data that will be used to test some of the code.
October 20, 2008
The Twitter Vote Report Project
As I had mentioned a few days ago in my round-up of citizen journalism efforts for the 2008 elections here in the United States, Twitter is proving to be ground-zero for the election zeitgeist.
Now we get the Twitter Vote Report project, which has introduced a few tags for election-day reporting about voting issues.
- #votereport- for reporting basic voting issues
- #machine- for reporting voting machine issues
- #registration- for registration problems
- #wait:time- for waiting time, where ‘time’ is number of minutes
- #EP[two letter state code]- for serious legal issues in that state (e.g. EPOH in Ohio)
- zipcode: to denote your exact location
A lot more is being planned to mine, use and act upon this information. There is a code jamming session on the 24th of October and guides are being developed for situations in which the above codes should be used.
techPresident highlights some of the issues that still need to be worked out:
- How do you get real people to use this, as opposed to the twitterati.
- Do we let the response be organic or organized?
- How to clarify the intent of this project (as opposed to the many others being organized)
And so forth. It’s all worth watching and participating in.
October 20, 2008
Resources for Getting Your Vote Counted
Nancy Scola at TechPresident has put together a set of resources to help you vote and make sure it counts. Especially interesting are resources for college students who vote where they go to school and the large variety of rules regarding voting by felons.
October 19, 2008
John McCain: For and Against Net Neutrality?
I was reading John McCain’s Technology Policy page on his web site and the following stood out:
John McCain Will Preserve Consumer Freedoms. John McCain will focus on policies that leave consumers free to access the content they choose; free to use the applications and services they choose; free to attach devices they choose, if they do not harm the network; and free to chose among broadband service providers.
When Regulation Is Warranted, John McCain Acts. John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like “net-neutrality,” but rather he believes that an open marketplace with a variety of consumer choices is the best deterrent against unfair practices.
The problem? The first paragraph about “preserving consumer freedoms” lists four things that McCain will protect- access content, apps and services, attach devices, and choice of service providers. In the next paragraph, he says that he does not believe in net-neutrality. The problem is that those four freedoms are what the FCC and other independent activists have adopted as the four principles of Net Neutrality.
So- is McCain simply against using the word net-neutrality, while agreeing with it on the four core principles? Lawrence Lessig has a detailed video about McCain’s policy, where he makes the argument that McCain is against regulating network neutrality but would rather leave them to “faith” on the network companies. The video follows (after the jump): Read the rest of this entry »
October 17, 2008
Citizen Journalism Resources for Election Day
in India
This election will be remembered as the first one where traditional media relied heavily on citizen journalism and new media. Take a look at Twitter’s Election 2008 live feed to get a feel for the political zeitgeist. Or how Free Press created “Rate the Debates”:http://www.freepress.net/debates to provide actual input from people before the pundits could formulate their conventional wisdom. Or how C-SPAN and NPR mined twitter for live fact checking, dialtests and general citizen journalism.
Well, election day will be no different. Twitter will probably end up being the place to gain a sense of the situation on the ground, but a lot of other web sites are hoping to provide people with the tools to report voter suppression, other problems and experiences. Here are a few resources:
SourceWatch.org’s Election Protection Wiki
The Election Protection Wiki is a non-partisan, non-profit collaboration of citizens, activists and researchers to build a one-stop-shop for reports of voter suppression and the systemic threats to election integrity. We collect just the straight facts that are fully referenced to external, verifiable sources, and we need your help.
Wired’s Election Problem Reporting Site
Over the next weeks, if you have trouble at the polls, either during early voting or on Election Day, we’d like you to add your issue to our map. Be sure to provide as much detail as possible. You may also include links to video or audio.
YouTube & PBS: Video Your Vote
YouTube’s Video Your Vote, a non-partisan program produced in partnership with PBS, encourages American voters to document their voting experiences.
Whether it’s a video shot at the polls on Election Day, an account of your early voting experience, or you filming yourself filling out an absentee ballot — we want you to upload it here.
The Video Your Vote channel is also a one-stop-shop to view exclusive videos from voter registration experts, election reform activists, and state officials, as well as video footage from the PBS archives for a historical look at voting through the years.
This site is designed to be a hub of information and action around efforts to suppress votes in the 2008 U.S. elections.
Citizen Media Law Project Blog
Has a lot of resources on the legality of documenting your vote and the areas in and around polling places.
The New York Times Polling Place Photo Project
The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this years primaries, caucuses and general election. By documenting local voting experiences, participants can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.
Anyone with a Twitter.com account can use their cell phones or their computers to send a message and notify voters and election monitors around the country.
I will add more to this page as I discover them.
UPDATE: Some resources to make sure your vote gets counted.
October 8, 2008
Let’s Not Insult Hackers
Let’s get one thing clear: The kid who broke in to vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was not a hacker.
I’m not even talking about the debate over the use of the word hacker as a pejorative. At a fundamental level, all this guy did was click on “Forgot Password”, answered “password questions” about Palin and reset her password. I’ll be charitable and call it clever, but let’s not call it hacking.
Unfortunately, any time someone does something remotely reproachable with a computer, the traditional media calls it hacking.
P.S. Make sure the answers to your own “Forgot Password” questions are sufficiently absurd.
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