Heather Gerken at Balkinization has set up this website to help keep real-time, ongoing track of conditions at election centers throughout the country. Please consider stopping by after you've voted and reporting your experience.
It only takes 30 seconds, and it has the potential to make election day go much more smoothly, not just today but for all future elections, as well.
I am in no way affiliated with the site, but let me give a pitch for why it's important.
The general premise of the site is to serve as one huge database for real-time reporting of election conditions throughout the country. Have to wait in line for 3 hours? Report it? Only waited in line 5 minutes? Report it. Denied a provisional ballot? Report it. Broken voting machines? Report it.
The idea is that lawyers, activists, election officials, media, and anyone else who cares will be able to look at the map and see where things are going well and where things aren't. There is even an option (totally optional, not mandatory) for you to enter your phone number if you're willing to be contacted by election officials or by the media about your experience, whatever that experience may be.
This is a great idea not only for making sure that today's election goes off well (and for letting people know where the problems are before it's too late to fix them!) but also for providing future information for researchers, politicians and people like us who are interested in working toward making the election system better. If we can see, for example, that most of the problems occurred in a particular kind of community (poor, minority, Democratic, Republican, whatever), that gives us real, hard data that will be an invaluable tool to fight for protection in future elections.
The results are visible to the public, so all of us here can see what's going on anywhere in the country.
So once you've voted, please consider entering your results here:
It takes all of 30 seconds and can really make a difference.
And I hate begging for recs, but if you think this is a valuable tool, please consider reccing this diary so that we can get participation from as many people in this diverse community as possible. This may be one of our best tools to make sure everyone, everywhere today and in the future gets to vote!
