Raised Eyebrow Blog

Every US Presidential election over the last 8 years (so two Bush victories and fingers crossed for a Democratic shift) has led to some innovative uses of the web for political organizing and campaigning. Those activities south of the border ultimately impact how many of our non-profit and political clients use the web in the years to come. This time out is certainly no exception, and the Obama campaign has been doing an impressive job throughout the Primaries and now through the election campaign, with both the official Obama website and other affiliated online campaigning ventures. At a conference I was at last week, what began to interest me more than that candidate work happening online was ways that the web is being used to monitor voter suppression/on-the-ground voting day issues. Two examples that have risen to the top for me are Theuptake.org and TwitterVoteReport.com:

• TheUptake.org is, in effect, a citizen journalism aggregating website, allowing users to upload campaign related video content that they produce to the website. They have a group within The Uptake of “Vote Chasers” that are focusing specifically on the highly contested states of Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Colorado and New Mexico to look at questionable tactics both parties are using to win those states. On November 4th, their citizen journalists will be monitoring polling stations to make sure voters are able to cast their ballots and reporting any voter suppression issues that arise. Due to the volume and distributed nature of their information gathering model — using many individuals who can capture video and images via cel phone technology — they’ll be able to report more widely than the current “traditional” news outlets can simply due to the sheer numbers of feet on the ground. The model is one that will be very familiar to any of you who recall the role of IndyMedia in the Seattle WTO events, though the advances in technology and the way that The Uptake is pulling content together and redistributing all contribute to a very strategic campaign.
• TwitterVoteReport.com is using Twitter feeds to get everyday citizens to report back on their voting day activities and then track those activities in one centralized place. In Twitter Vote Report’s own words, the idea is to achieve the following:
  

  Voters can read these messages and help one another solve problems, liking letting someone know when a polling place has been moved. Advocacy groups can use them to spot problems. Citizens can figure out how to lend fellow voters a hand. And the press can zero in on local voting stories worth telling. Just sending in short reports can help your fellow citizens to vote.

  They’re doing all of this through the use of specific “hash-tags” for people to report on specific topics, so things like “#machine” for voter machine issues, or “#wait:[minutes]” for reports of long lines at specific polling stations. Now there are, to date, a fairly limited number of registered US voters using Twitter, however, the concept of using the power of individuals to amass a larger picture of what is happening around a vital issue like voter access is a powerful vision for a seemingly frivolous tool like Twitter.

If you know of other cool web tools being used for election campaigning, please leave them in the comments, we could I’m sure write a book on all the examples out there.

This entry was written by Emira Mears on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 10:12 am, is filed under Nonprofit Tech, Online Strategy, The Social Web, and is tagged as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.