So, we've now got a real live website up and running at TwitterVoteReport.com. It's definitely got some kinks and holes that earn it its "beta" badge. But in a word, phew. Also, Rocketboom stopped by the Twitter Vote Report coding session last Friday at the Change You Want to See Gallery in Williamsburg. Look at those crazy "save the world" kids with their laptops and cats!
Over on the Columbia Journalism Review, you'll find me arguing that the brand-new New York Times' APIs are a terrific example of how the struggling paper can win by rededicating itself to doing what it does best. If you're infamiliar, APIs are more or less how software programs talk to each other. And the New York Times, the argument goes, can win by quitting. Give up trying to master the web, get back to making the news, and let the Internet do the rest. Hope you'll give it a read.
I've mentioned it here only in passing, I think, but I've been working on a project that involves using Twitter to report concerns, questions, and challenges of casting a ballot across the country. In a way, it's simple -- just attached the #votereport hashtag to your tweets and they'll flow into an open, decentralized, vote reporting system now being built building by an amazing collection of developers and thinkers donating their time to the project. The details are a bit more involved, and I'll have more on that in a bit.
But for now, the Election Protection coalition -- created in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election and comprised of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and about a million other organizations -- have joined up with Rock the Vote and techPresident to issue a press release that gives an accessible overview of the Twitter Vote report project. Allison Fine and I wrote a blog post proposing the idea less than a month ago, so seeing it ramp up so quickly has, frankly, been breathtaking. Stay tuned for more.
That's the gist of a Q&A I did with James Grimmelmann, the professor at New York Law School who running the open access law project as part of their unique Do Tank. It's over at Worldchanging, and even though I ruined the punchline, you should still probably have a look. If you need more incentive, lemme just tell you that some states and local governments are claiming coypyright and going after people for putting copies of laws up online. Crazy, right? Go read.
I had an interesting experience this week. It all began when I read a post on the New York Times Caucus blog that reported that more than six million questions had been submitted online for Tuesday night's presidential "town hall" in Nashville. Hmm, I said to myself, that sounds fishy. I knew enough to know that MyDebates.org was the official online partner of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) and that the public's ability to send in questions for the debate through MyDebates had barely been publicized. So the idea that six million questions had somehow been submitted rang false. But that New York Times post had no external links and no named sources for that nugget of information.
So I did some digging, and it turned out that indeed the number was bunk. The six million was a casual reference at a social lunch event in Nashville that mistakenly ended up in in a Gray Lady blog post. Frank Fahrenkopf, the co-chair of the CPD, told me that he had been the source for that six million figure, saying that he picked it up from Mark Whitaker, the NBC News Washington bureau chief (who replaced Tim Russert after Russert's death). Whitaker in turn told me that the six million actually referred to every bit of communication the network got in reference to Tuesday night's debate -- not by any means, the number of actual questions that came in online, which actually turned out to number just over 25,000, about 1/240th of what was reported. Whitaker called the figure "misinterpreted and misused."
I posted on the "six million questions question" on techPresident on Wednesday afternoon, and then updated it on Thursday and Friday as I learned more. (In retrospect, it would have been good practice for me to date and timestamp those updates.) The New York Times ended up posting a "clarification."
Meanwhile, though, this bogus nugget of information was busy spreading across the world. Many publications cited "six million questions were asked online" as fact, all, it seems, because it was in a New York Times blog post. The imprimatur of the Times goes a long way, and there's the presumption that if it runs under the Times' masthead, it's true. In the pieces that picked up the six million reference, often no source was given and rarely was it linked to the original source. That wildly incorrect figure ended up being quoted everywhere from the LA Times to the Boston Globe to Australia's the Age to Grist to the Winnipeg Free Press, just to pick on just a few news outlets. Some places have since corrected it. Many others haven't.
Bloggers, of course, link stuff. It's what we do, and it's looking like an awfully good practice right now. Every reporter and writer gets things wrong, of course, but linking to sources can help minimize the damage. With no links back to the original source in those derivative pieces, the Times' "clarification" didn't help even the most careful reader all that much.
For more on the six million question questions, the Columbia Journalism Review's Megan McGinley and Armin Rosen covered the story on Friday afternoon.
UPDATE: The New York Times' Brian Stelter suggests that linking is going mainstream, writing that "[e]mbracing the hyperlink ethos of the Web to a degree not seen before, news organizations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors." What Brian describes are mostly content-sharing arrangement and aggregator projects, but they're nonetheless a step forward. "For bloggers," he writes, "linking to original reporting, primary sources and discussions about stories is a form of etiquette, assigning credit to others who have written about a topic." Indeed.
By Nancy Scola and Allison Fine (Originally posted on techPresident)
We know. It sounds ridiculous at first. But it might not be as crazy as you think.
Why not? Well, here's what we're thinking. We all know that American elections can be messy affairs. As longtime online organizer Jon Pincus recently noted, "voter suppression relies to a large extent on information asymmetry." That imbalance, if not corrected for, can create just enough hoops that discourage all but the most motivated among us from jumping through them on our way to voting. From voter caging to misleading fliers to faulty machinery to the long waits exacerbated by poorly trained poll workers, it's often a lack of knowing that jams up the process.
And for far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there's an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time.
Enter Twitter. In its few years of existence Twitter has proven amazingly adept at one thing: empowering its users to move around 140-character-or-less chunks around quickly and agilely. How Twitter is being used for political ends is constantly evolving. And while Twitter is easiest to use on the Web, it's a one-to-one and one-to-many and many-to-many communications powerhouse available to anyone with a cell phone in his or her pocket. That's powerful, potentially game-changing stuff.
We believe that Twitter can be instrumental in this election in correcting for some of the information imbalances that plagues American elections:
Empowering Self-Organized Volunteers: Much of Twitter's power comes from its simplicity. It's inherently flexible. As problems pop up, as they do every election, volunteers and activists can organize on the fly to quickly get information out. A few weeks ago, college kids in Virginia's Montgomery Country were startled to find a misleading notice telling them that voting in that state might jeopardize their student loans and scholarships. Chaos ensued. A second ominous notice from the county made things worse. Any enterprising young politico could have jumped into Twitter, created a @collegevoters account, and become the instant information hub.
Sharing Patterns: As the saying goes, once is a fluke. Twice might be a coincidence. But three times is a pattern. Joe Voter might be mildly irked when his ballot is rejected for not matching up with the newly-mandated statewide voter databases. But it goes from irked to real problem when it's happening to his neighbors in nearby precincts and counties. In Wisconsin recently, database troubles prevented election judges from voting during a test run. The state later suspended use of the database, but other states won't find out there's trouble until Election Day. Savvy volunteers watching the polls on election could tag Twitter posts with a pre-determined hashtag -- #NJHAVAmatch, for example. Tracking that feed is an easy way to track the pattern of missteps and malfunctions.
Serving as Mobile Legal Aide: On election day, questions arise. Should the local Republican/Democratic party bigwig really be sharing a cup of coffee and a donut with the chief election judge? How far back from the polls can we insist campaign pamphleteers stay? They're asking anyone with a Hispanic last name for ID -- is that okay? This is the time to call in the lawyers! Twitter can either work as a private chat line or a broadcast service. A volunteer with a sensitive inquiry about, say, a particular person's case could "direct message" @DNClegal to ask for guidance. Someone wanting her question to @RNClegal to be heard (along with its answer) by anyone in his Twitter can simply make it public.
Smart Routing Around Resource Gaps: When you wanted to know how long the lines were at New York City Apple stories during the release of new iPhone 3G, the Apple website, the place to go wasn't the local TV new or CNN or even blogs -- it was Twitter. In 2004, the uneven distribution of voting equipment that hampered voting in so many precincts in Ohio and elsewhere was compounded by the fact that voters tend to swarm, showing up at the polls at the same time. Ohio has started early voting this time around, but the lines are still sometimes long. On election day, Twitter can help monitor the wait times at polling places -- information that clever local news outlets would well serve their audiences by then broadcasting out.
Guiding the Watchdogs: Elections seem to run more smoothly when the eyes of the press are watching. During the recent protests around the Republican Convention in St. Paul, Twitter became a dispatch hub for activists, journalists, and support staff. In the midst of the chaos, news crews were having a tough time figuring out where to direct their attention. After Nathan Oyler, a.k.a. notq on Twitter, tweeted that medics gathered on a certain street corner were fearing arrest, News Hour with Jim Lehrer, one of the most respected shows in TV journalism, responded: "We're sending someone now," and then double-checked the address -- all via Twitter.
There are obvious reasons why Twitter won't work as an antidote to all of our election troubles. And there's the ever-present risk of the Fail Whale making an appearance. That charming cartoon that alerted users to a downed system was far too familiar in the service's early days. That said, Twitter has been markedly more stable in recent months. (Though not, alas, without problems.) And tens of millions of Americans will be casting ballots at over 200,000 polling places on November 4th, making the monitoring of events nationwide overwhelming.
However, there is an intersection of heavy voting registration (coinciding with large number of young voters) in battleground precincts in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina Ohio and Colorado where Twitter can best be put to use to direct Tweeters to specific information or actions in specific election districts.
So, let's begin. To get the ball rolling, we're suggesting one standardized format for hashtagging election protection tweets to use as voting registration is drawing to a close in most states and early voting is starting. It goes like this: [state] + [first four letters of the county] + [precinct, if known]. So, in downtown Cleveland, for example, the hashtag would be #OHCuya07. Of course, that format won't work for every election problem. But we know the web can come up with something.
The Berkman Center's Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich have put together a new 10-page report on how digital technology -- blogs, wikis, cell phones, text messages, Google Maps mashups and so forth -- impacted Kenya's post-presidential vote period. Called "Digitally Networked Technology in Kenya's 2007-2008 Post-Election Crisis," it's a much needed dose of skepticism about the assumption that the only possible future connective technologies can deliver us to is one of prosperity and peace:
On January 1, 2008, Kenyans started to receive frightening text message that urged readers to express their frustrations with the election outcome by attacking other ethnic groups. One such message reads, "Fellow Kenyans, the Kikuyu's have stolen our children's future...we must deal with them in a way they understand...violence."
The devil's in the details, though. The obvious parallel to the hateful text messages that circulated during the early days of the violence in Kenya was how talk radio fanned the flames during the Rwandan genocide. But, the authors note, there's a difference: while radio is more or less pure broadcast technology, texting can be "multidirectional." Perhaps there's hopefulness in the idea that we're learning to quit investing in technologies that only let us talk and not talk back. (On that point -- The estimate for the number of cell phone subscribers in all of Africa was something like 250 million last year, out of a population of some 900 million.)
