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Online Tools to Help You Get from the Ballot Box and Back

BY Miranda Neubauer | Friday, November 2 2012

In just a few days the long presidential election campaign will be over, and — hopefully — the deciding votes cast. But Election Day will for some mean polling places changed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, voter ID laws to comply with, potentially long lines to get to the voting booth and maybe even some unfamiliar decisions to make on the ballot.

There's an entire fleet of online tools to help voters through this process, whether they're dedicated to helping report problems at polling place or to get up to speed on where to vote and what to vote on. TechPresident has been compiling a list of election-day resources. We think we got most of them but invite you to help by letting us know about any we've missed.

Here are a few of the most interesting and useful election-day initiatives to cross our radar:

My Fair Election

My Fair Election, a volunteer project led by Archon Fung, an associate professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, hopes to act as a sort of Yelp for voting. Voters can look up their polling place and then rate their experience from one to five stars. Fung says the hope is that with enough ratings, volunteers can create a "heat map" of election conditions all around the country to illustrate where voting is easy and where it is difficult. Where people report a lot of election-day problems, the reports themselves might generate pressure on election officials to bring about change.

But the site only launched about a week ago.

"The main challenge is to get the word out," Fung said.

Fung said he started the site in 2008, motivated by the issues that came up in the 2000 election and his sense that both parties were often more focused on expanding the size of their own franchise and in some cases actively discouraging people from going to the polls.

"When I first did this in 2008 I was very much hoping that this kind of thing would catch on and that bigger organizations would carry the ball forward," he said. "It's surprising that there isn't much more stuff like this right now."

My Fair Election uses the Google Civic Information API to obtain poll site information, then builds on top of that with the opportunity for voters to rate their electoral experience.

"With a lot of other projects it's just for problems," Fung said said. "My thought is that it was important to register the good as well as the bad, to tell where things were going well and people should be credited." The website is also accessible by mobile devices.

Poll Watch USA

Created during the Personal Democracy Forum hackathon earlier this summer, Poll Watch USA is a site accessible by mobile device that voters can use to look up their polling place, then, while there, indicate if there are any problems in real time.

The backers of the project, Common Cause New York, Reboot and WebSava, tested the service during the New York City primaries, when it was accessed by about 500 individuals. It has now been expanded to cover all of New York state, although Susan Lerner executive director of Common Cause/NY, indicated that the poll lookup function might not be without errors outside New York City because of difficulties getting data from state officials and possible polling location changes in part due to Hurricane Sandy.

Reports submitted via the site are mapped, and voters, members of the press or public can see how many reports were submitted for a particular polling place. Voters have the option of adding their phone number when they submit a report to get feedback, calling the voter assistance hotline being offered by Common Cause and other groups, or tweeting the report. On the backend, Common Cause will be monitoring the reports together with NYPIRG as part of the Election Protection Coalition, in real-time and for later follow-up to give feedback to election officials. The project received support from the Voting Information Project and Latino Justice.

Voting Information Project

Many projects get their data from the Voting Information Project, managed by the New Organizing Institute as part of a collaborative effort between NOI, conservative digital firm Engage, the Pew Center for the States and technology partners Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Facebook and AT&T. VIP's goal is to make polling place and related information freely accessible, and it accomplishes this by working with election officials and secretaries of state around the country to collect, clean, sort and present that information as machine-readable, developer-friendly data feeds.

NOI also leads the Ballot Information Project, an effort to make a database of ballot information accessible all the way down to the county level. Google's Civic Information API draws on both sources, but it's important to note that both sources exist separate and apart from Google's own data empire — unlike, say, Goole Maps data, Google supports these data feeds but doesn't claim ownership.

The VIP Data is also in use by the Obama campaign, the Democratic National Committee, Mobile Commons, Foursquare, Facebook, CNN and OurVoteLive, among others. BIP data is also being used by TheBallot.org, TurboVote and MoveOn, among others.

Another tool offered by NOI is the Organizer's Guide to Election Administration, an accessible guide to election law in all 50 states and Washington D.C.

"In the past voters who were experiencing problems called in and traditionally volunteers then had to go through paper PDFs of voting regulations to look up how to solve the problem," said Evan Sutton, communications manager at NOI.

The OGEA creates an easier workflow to look up those issues, Sutton explained. It will be used by OurVoteLive, a website created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to log voting-related problems for the Election Protection Coalition with funding from craigconnects.org, and which can now accept reports online, via phone and e-mail, and by the NAACP. "If somebody in Wisconsin says I'm being asked for an I.D. but I thought I didn't need an I.D, the organizer can say, no there's an injunction against that, here's the statute you can cite," Sutton explained.

Below is our broader list of election-day resources. If you think we've missed any, feel free to email us or make your additions on this public, anyone-can-edit copy of the Google spreadsheet below. We'll pull from that spreadsheet onto this one sometime before Nov. 6, but obviously anyone can track, copy and improve the public version of this index at this link in the meantime.

News Briefs

RSS Feed friday >

Chilean Anti-Corruption Resource: A Crowdsourced Database of Social and Political Connections

In countries where a small minority of social circles have a majority of the political and economic power, personal relationships can affect major decision-making, a serious concern of anti-corruption activists. A new web platform stores personal profiles of key players in Chilean business and politics, complete with biographies and personal and professional connections through family, education, social circles, employers and coworkers, to make tracking social relationships and conflict-of-interest easier. Called Poderopedia (from the Spanish word for power), the project sounds kind of like LinkedIn, but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.

GO

Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens

Mobily, an arm of the state-owned Middle Eastern telecom giant Etihad Etisalat, has been accused of working with Saudi Arabia to develop software that would allow the government to bypass protections for social media users. The exposé comes from Moxie Marlinspike (neé Matthew Rosenfield), an expert in a certain type of malicious Internet attack called MITM (man-in-the-middle), whereby attackers intercept and secretly alter private messages exchanged via email and other social media platforms. GO

Saudi Religious Leader Warns Twitter Users of Consequences in the Afterlife

In late March, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric said Twitter was for clowns and corrupters. Earlier this week, he said anyone using social media, in particular Twitter, “has lost this world and the afterlife.” His comments might be laughable, if they did not come at a time when the Saudi government is looking into monitoring or blocking social media sites and eliminating user anonymity.

GO

thursday >

What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform legislation supported in Silicon Valley. "We're going to create a virtual digital storm," said Jeremy Robbins in a Wednesday ... GO

The New Yorker Hopes "Strongbox" Is a Wiretap-Proof Sieve for Leaks

The New Yorker yesterday became the first outlet to implement DeadDrop, a new system for sources to submit information to journalists online in a more secure and anonymous way than, for example, email. GO

Female Organizer of Pakistan's First Hackathon Stresses Collaboration Over Competition

After Pakistan banned Valentine's Day this year, Sabeen Mahmud started an online protest in which people uploaded photos to mock the government ban. In the weeks following she received death threats and menacing phone calls, and early on she had to stay home from work. That did nothing, however, to keep her from further organizing. Last month, the café she started in Karachi hosted Pakistan's first ever hackathon, which tackled problems including sanitation, crime, disaster management, and education. She even invited a government representative to observe the initial conversations, tackling sensitive areas like government inefficiency and elections.

GO

wednesday >

White House Innovation Fellows Project Spins Off Into A Business

Clay Johnson and Adam Becker joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to help the White House fix the way government does business. Now they're turning that mission into a business themselves. GO

Fighting Fires With Data, New York City Launches New Safety Inspection System

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies. GO

Chinese Netizens Use Digital Initiative to Gain Media Attention for Unsolved Poisoning Case

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition to the U.S. President.

GO

PDF France 2013: “Au Code, Citoyens!”

This year PDF France will take place in Paris on June 13, with the theme "Au Code, Citoyens!" ("To Code, Citizens!") The speakers' lineup includes some of the continent's leaders in the digital revolution. GO

tuesday >

Website Imitation is Flattery in New York City Council Race

A New York City Council candidate who had made his name as a technology consultant and spearheaded an open government initiative several years ago found parts of his website copied by another City Council candidate in a different borough, as Politicker first reported. GO

Mike Honda Locks Up Establishment Support, But Challenger Has Ear of the Silicon Valley Elite

Some of Silicon Valley's most influential business people will hold a fundraiser in San Francisco this Thursday for Ro Khanna, the 36-year-old lawyer who's challenging 71-year-old California Democrat Mike Honda for his 17th Congressional District seat. The names at the top of the invite: Ron Conway and Sean Parker. They're apparently forming a committee to help Khanna build his campaign. The other bold-face names who are listed as part of the 'committee in formation' include Salesforce.com's Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Benchmark Capital General Partners' Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton, tech entrepreneur Shawn Fanning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, her big data venture investor husband Zach Bogue, and Conway's SV Angel colleague, Founder and Managing Partner David Lee. GO

Tools to Keep Independent Media Online in Hostile Environments

Websites and media outlets in developing countries or countries with corrupt or repressive regimes struggle daily to fend off hacker attacks, some from their own government — like the Malaysian news portal Sarawak Report, which techPresident reported was taken down in April by sustained denial-of-service attacks. The negative attention controversial reporting draws can scare local advertisers away as well, making it difficult for a media company to support itself. Media Frontiers offers two services to websites dealing with either of those problems.

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monday >

Ahead of September Elections, German Pirate Party Picks Its Platform

The German Pirate Party held its election year convention over the weekend and approved its party platform, following lengthy debate over the role that online decision-making should have within the party, as German news sources reported and the party outlined on its own web platforms. GO

Peruvians Petition their President to Stick Up for their Digital Rights

Peru’s civil society advocacy groups have started an online petition outlining their ‘non-negotiable’ demands for digital rights and freedom of speech. The campaign was prompted by the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Lima, Peru, will soon host the 17th round of secretive TPP trade talks, which will take place from May 15 – 24.

GO

Gun Control Advocates Take Aim At LivingSocial for Promoting Guns and Alcohol

A coalition of advocacy groups is launching a new campaign this week against the promotion of American gun culture. The campaign focuses on the daily deals site Living Social, which hasn't stopped promoting social events Hunter S. Thompson would have loved (they promote shooting off guns and letting off steam and drinking.) GO

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