Social Media and Voting

The marathon campaign is gasping to the finish line. Record numbers of voters are expected to turn out across the country on this Election Day. In keeping with our mission to bring you what’s new, we’re focusing today on the intersection of technology and the voting booth. We talk about how social media like YouTube and Facebook have given voters new tools to participate in our democratic process. We also take a look at how Twitter is being used to report problems at the polls and get a real-time update on how that project is going. Brady Carlson, NHPR's new media coordinator, told us a while back that 2008 was to be the first true Internet election. He joins the show to discuss whether the Web was indeed a game changer in this election.

We dig deeper into the impact of online media with Anil Dash, vice president of Six Apart, the world’s leading blogging software and services company. He’s been blogging since 1999, and helped develop the social publishing software Movable Type, used by millions of bloggers, as well as the campaigns of Dean, Kerry, Bush and Obama. He discusses what value these social networks add to the campaigns, and how the Web could be used not just to mobilize people to act, but to get them involved in solving the issues that motivated them to participate in the first place.

More than 125 million people are projected to vote in this election. Even if an estimated third of those people voted early, accusations of “stolen elections” in 2000 and 2004 haunt many Americans. True or not, several watchdog organizations have sprung up to make sure every vote is cast and counted. But you don’t have to be an election monitor to track what’s happening at the polls. Twitter is the micro-blogging tool that allows people to communicate what they’re doing through messages of 140 characters are less. Twitter Vote Report is partnering with the non-partisan Election Protection Coalition and Rock the Vote, NPR, the Voter Suppression Wiki, and other groups. It’s the brainchild of Allison Fine, a senior fellow at Demos and senior editor at Tech President, a project of Personal Democracy Forum. Allison joins Word of Mouth with more on how Twitter Vote Report could make a difference in how smoothly voting goes today.

Brady also leads us through other projects that have caught his eye, including YouTube's Video Your Vote project, and Video the Vote, a national initiative to protect voting rights by monitoring the electoral process. Both of these ventures make it easy to upload your videos and share them with the world. Google has an election map tool – you put in your address and it finds your polling place. And there's free stuff people can snag for voting, from music, Starbucks coffee, Krispy Kreme donuts, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and even a meal at Shane's Rib Shack. Brady also gives us a preview of what the TV network and cable news programs are doing to maintain audience, by rolling out sophisticated new technology to attract viewers tonight, including giant screens in Times Square and real live holograms.

(Photo by Gabriel)