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Watching democracy at work, one vote at a time

October 31, 2008 11:46pm
by Richard Waters

ballotbox.jpgGet ready for wall-to-wall online coverage of US election day. Every butterfly ballot, frozen voting machine lever and hanging chad could get its 15 seconds of fame.

The aim is certainly an admirable one: to make democracy totally transparent.

Twitter will be running the Twitter Vote Report (in association with the techPresident blog.) A place for anyone to broadcast his or her voting experience, Twitter says it hopes to weed out “long lines, broken machines, and registered voters who can’t vote because their names aren’t showing up on the registration rolls.”

YouTube has come up with the Videoyourvote channel (in association with PBS) to do much the same.

The exhibitionism of the YouTube generation could well clash with American voting tradition, however. More than half of US states ban voters from publicly displaying their own marked ballots, and 17 states don’t allow any recording inside polling stations at all (this is a full listing, from the Citizen Media Law Project.) I wonder how many of those personal testaments will end up coming from inside a police cell.

Whatever else, this will certainly be the most observed election day of all time. If all that voter-generated content had been around eight years ago, maybe Al Gore would have made it to the White House after all.

October 31, 2008 11:46pm in Internet | Comment

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