Twitter Vote Report--Citizens Driving the Election

A volunteer network of software developers, designers, and other collaborators have teamed up with the award-winning blog techPresident to launch Twitter Vote Report. Individual voters will use their cell phones to report on their individual experiences – the good, bad and ugly. 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? With Twitter Vote Report, we’ll know the answers to those questions straight from voters from all over the country.

Twitter Vote Report was inspired by a techPresident 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.

Voters can also send a message to Twitter Vote Report by:
• Sending a text message to 66937 beginning with #votereport
• Calling to (567) 258-8683 (258-VOTE) to leave a message by touch tone keypad
• Downloading the Twitter Vote Report iPhone application

Participating in the Twitter Vote Report project are an impressive range of organizations including the Election Protection Coalition, Rock the Vote, Credo Mobile, Common Cause, Plodt, YouTube, Twittervision, NPR’s Social Media Desk, Independence Year Foundation, The Center for Community Change, Student PIRGs, PBS, Video the Vote, Election Suppression Wiki, Women Donors Network, and Demos. In addition, Current TV will be using the #votereport information as part of their special election coverage throughout the day.

Matt Cooperrider, a key architect of the effort, called Twitter Vote Report “the best aspects of grassroots activism and digital technology combined with an open source ethos to really change the way we participate in elections.”

"The goal of Twitter Vote Report is to expand the ways in which Americans participate in the electoral process this Election Day," said Nancy Scola, associate editor at techPresident. Andrew Rasiej, founder of techPresident, added, "This Twitter campaign is an ideal example of the combined power of social media and impassioned citizens to participate in our democracy. Power and control is shifting from politicians and campaigns to people and we'll be able to see that in real-time on Election Day."

Please visit www.twittervotereport.com to learn more about how Twitter and other technology tools will be used on November 4th to track voters Election Day voting experiences.