When votes are mangled on election day, when people are turned away, or misled, or intimidated; when names have been purged without notice or challenged illegally, it’s very tough to protect the outcome because it’s so hard to get to the site of the violation in time to fix it before voters give up. At least it’s always been that way. And because older machines go to poor, minority precincts, and because mean-spirited efforts to defraud less sophisticated voters often affect Democrats disproportionately, as reported in Rolling Stone, any effort that gets help where it needs to be faster and more effectively can make a big difference not only for for Obama but also for down-ballot races.
A crew of some of the coolest nerds on the Web have come together to harness Twitter and other tools to help. It’s really simple; you can tweet (or text) violations, line lengths and other info, and use "hash tags" (these #) so that people following the issue will receive the message on their Twitter readers and send help. If you don’t want to bother with Twitter, text to 66937 and start your message with “#votereport." (That’s a "hash tag" — see how simple?) Bloggers like Nancy Walzman at PoliticsWest, who is based in Colorado where there’s much at stake, and Nancy Scola and Alison Fine at TechPresident can give you more details. Our vigilance can really make a difference.
Just for fun, here’s a diagram of how it works. Basically though, you just text or Tweet this the same way you do anything else. And you should. I also want to renew my plea (easy for me to say since I’m not a lawyer) for you to make yourself available on election day to protect the process, every committed voter, and, as far as I’m concerned, our country.
