Liminal states

Psymbolic 4, at the Gingerbread House in SF.  Liam Shy, Dr. Spook, Predators (with their CD as a bonus) … it had been a long week so we left at about 3 a.m. and missed the last few DJs, but a fine night nonetheless.  As we said our goodbyes to Spook on the way out, he commented that it was a happy crowd.   Gee, I wonder why?

A few months ago Amy Alexander had said to me that if Obama won, there would be a huge mental sigh of relief across the country.  Indeed.

And what better way to relax!

With long lines all over the country, the Voter Suppression Wiki is issuing another action alert with a reminder that as long as you’re in line when the polls close, you can still vote.

“Voters who are in line before their local polling place closes must be allowed to vote,” says Lillie Coney of EPIC and the National Center for Voting Integrity.  “Walking toward the line at the time the polls close does not count.  If there is a line after 4PM typically it will only get longer, so it’s best to get in line now for the duration.”

While most election workers are familiar with this rule, some may not be.  Voters who encounter problems should immediately call a hotline such as 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683) or the Spanish-language 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA (1-888-839-8682).

“Even if you’ve already voted, you can help get the word out by texting or phoning any friends and relatives you know who are standing in line,” says Jon Pincus, one of the organizers of the Voter Suppression Wiki.  “Bloggers and local radio stations can also help by broadcasting this information — and anybody doing last-minute get out the vote work should make sure to tell people as well.”

Poll closing times vary from state to state; http://866ourvote.org and http://govote.org offer convenient ways of checking online.  Be wary of deceptive emails and text messages claiming that the election has been continued until tomorrow — it’s not true.

“In many places, our voting system frustrates people to the point of driving them away from the process,” said Baratunde Thurston, initial creator of the wiki. “We cannot surrender to such a system, and one way to combat it is to make sure people know if you’re in line before closing time, you get to vote. It’s that simple.”

Why Vote?
a Fib, by
Gregory K.

Vote.
Why?
Folks fight
For this right.
It’s not just a word:
Vote! It’s how you make your voice heard.

Originally published on Gottabook

They’re already voting in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, so Election Day has officially begun.  Showtime!

We’ve just finished our last minute polishing for the Voter Suppresssion Wiki, with a redesigned home page, a  Voter Suppression Documented summary with snippets of a dozen different examples, final touches to the Media Room, the Prepare for election day action alert, and a chat room.  We’ve continued to get some great press, with Caitlin Johnson’s Txt the Vote: Election Protection Goes High Tech on OneWorld/Yahoo News! featuring one of our members, and Simon Jones’ Citizens, Media Use Social Media to Monitor Election giving some great context.

We continue to have successes: flagging a deceptive report falsely claiming that people were arrested, getting our one-page What to do if you have problems document posted in a library in South Carolina.   Baratunde’s 90-second guide to election day video got over 1,000 views after YouTube selected it as a featured video.  Another wiki member submitted her story to the Huffington Post.  Multiply this by a few hundred people on our project — and dozens of other projects in the grassroots election protection and citizen journalism movement — and it adds up to a big impact.

On election day, the Incident Tracker will be where the action is on the wiki.  We’ll be updating it regularly, sifting through the various sources on the web and threads in our discussion forum, and linking to any action alerts.  Please check it out; and if you see any voter suppression or articles about it, please let us know about it!

Of course there are a many other sites around the web that also have great reporting.  Here’s a quick roundup of a few other sites.

Our Vote Live, a joint project of the Election Protection Coalition and EFF, features a live feed and queryable interface to the reports that go into the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline.  With over 40,000 reports already, it’s a rich data source — for example, here’s their Ohio page, and the list of the 200 reported incidents so far of voter intimidation.
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Colleen Mondor, Lee Wind, and my brother Gregory K came up with a great idea for a cooperative blogging project at the recent Kid Lit ’08 conference in Portland: people writing about why they personally think that voting matters.  Over fifty people wound up participating, and since most of them are writers or reviewers as well as bloggers, it’s no surprise that the results are pretty incredible — deeply personal stories from a variety of perspectives.

Colleen’s got the roundup on Chasing Ray.  Strongly recommended!

And I’m happy to say that Greg followed the Voter Suppression Wiki’s recommended best practices, and included the phone numbers for 1-866-OUR-VOTE and 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA at the end of his post Why I Vote on Gottabook 🙂

The Voter Suppression Wiki has issued our second action alert, this one focused on preparations for election day at the polls, along with a video that’s already been featured by YouTube. As Baratunde Thurston says in our media release, “All of the debates, research, organizing and enthusiasm can be undermined if people don’t head to the polls prepared.”

Maybe you already know all this — you’ve stored the hotline numbers on your phone (including the Spanish and Asian language ones just in case you run into somebody who needs help), you’ve printed out information about your rights, and you’ve got a six-pack of bottled water and a spare umbrella ready to bring with you to the polls. You can still help by passing the word on to your friends and family, online and off. Get the word out online via email, Facebook, MySpace, Black Planet, Twitter, and other social network sites … and then get the word out offline too, to reach people such as seniors most at risk for voter suppression.

A special note to any bloggers and journalists who are reading this: please provide similar information to your readers. You can cut-and-paste from our action alert and media release; or you can roll your own post from the other great information out there — the Election Protection Resources page on SourceWatch’s Election Protection Wiki is a great place to start. Please take the time and invest the effort to help protect voting rights. While you’re at it, take some of the space you usually reserve for running ads and promoting your site, and use it to promote democracy instead. Please feature election protection information like hotline numbers on your blog’s front page.

And to anybody reading this, please digg the action alert and the video — and pass the links around! Continue Reading »

Last year on Hallowe’en , right before my last day at Microsoft, I wrote

Hallowe’en’s always been one of our favorite holidays, and of course our hood is one of the best places to celebrate it.  We’re both in a fairly low-key mood tonight, so rather than trick-or-treating, we’ll have a nice relaxing dinner, perhaps a glass of champagne and a bottle of wine (Chateauneuf de Pape probably suits our mood better than Adastra) … and no doubt a scrumptious dessert.

This year, after a summer of fighting for civil liberties and a new rebirth of freedom, it’s the homestretch — and I’m right in the middle of it, with Voter Suppression Wiki and Twitter Vote Report.  Jeff Santos had me on 1510 the Zone (a Boston sports radio station doing a week-long special election series) to talk about voter suppression today, and introduced me as a patriot — and not in the corrupted neocon sense of the word either.  (I mentioned 866-OUR-VOTE and 888-YE-Y-VOTA and veyvota.org at least a half dozen times, and AALDEF as well.)  Fox News did a fair and balanced piece on TVR today; Voter Suppression Wiki will be able to get the word to CNN on election day if we need to, and Brad Friedman’s will be checking in with us.  I feel really lucky to be working with such incredible people and organizations — the Voter Suppression Wiki and everybody else at the intersection of the grassroots election protection and citizen journalism movements…. and I wonder if the rest of the world looks at the 8-hour-long lines in Georgia as a parallel to the first post-apartheid election in South Africa?

Who knows what Tuesday will bring.  Right now, it’s infintite possibilities … and the sense that a change is coming.

And after dinner once again at Ma Tante Sumi (Chateauneuf du Pape again), Geomagnetic.tv’s Phantasmagoria 8 is tonight — Hallowe’en and psytrance in San Francisco, hanging out with the woman I love most of all on a special night.

What a difference a year makes.

cross-posted on Pam’s House Blend, OpenLeft, and MyDD and Oxdown Gazette, with various differences due to HTML incompatibilities but some cool polls to make up for it.

Executive Summary:

1. Print out election protection documents on Friday and Saturday, at work (unless you’d get fired) and at home (if you have a fast printer): My Vote, My Right state-by-state voter bill of rights fliers,  Election Protection and Ya es hora more detailed state-by-state legal information, and/or some of the other information linked to in this post.  Don’t be greedy and hog the printer.  Let your colleagues protect their votes too.
2. Give them away and discuss with friends, family, fellow canvassers and phonebankers, and at places of worship over the weekend …
3. Print out some more on Monday
4. Take them to the polls

Details:

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Cyberspace — A diverse group of bloggers, community organizers, media professionals, technologists, and voting rights activists have issued a report with several last-minute recommendations to reduce voter suppression in the upcoming US Election.  Some of the most significant opportunities involve increasing awareness of resources like the non-partisan Election Protection hotlines at 1-866-OUR-VOTE/1-888-VE-Y-VOTA, engaging the tens of thousands of participants in citizen journalism projects observing the election, and ensuring that voters and activists prepare for a chaotic environment on election day.

“Rather than simply making people feel frustrated and disheartened about the challenge, the Voter Suppression Wiki has allowed average citizens to participate in the protection of their most fundamental democratic right, that of voting,” said Baratunde Thurston, co-founder of the Jack & Jill Politics blog and initial creator of the wiki. “WIth this workshop, by collaborating across geographic, professional and demographic lines, we have distilled a handful of recommendations that can have a real impact on the voting process.”

A central theme in the recommendations is the need to engage many more people — not just activists — in election protection activities. Tracy Viselli of Reno and Its Discontentscomments, “Voters in battleground states are particularly hungry for information about how to protect their votes because they are anticipating problems. The good news is that voters seem to have gotten the message about how important early voting is. Unfortunately, though, many voters still don’t know what they can do if they’re faced with a problem voting at the polls.”

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Last-minute strategies to reduce voter suppression

Audio available here

The Voter Suppression Wiki’s Workshop on Last-minute strategies to reduce voter suppression identified several major opportunities to protect voting rights during the week of the election. While election officials, campaigns, and non-partisan organizations have all made major effort to inform voters, there is still a significant lack of awareness of key resources such as state and national hotline numbers and online sites that allow people to check their polling location. Blogs and other online media could play a big role by providing election protection information on their front pages between now and the election; real-world community hubs such as libraries, coffeeshops and bars, and community technology centers also can make this information much more prominent. More effective coordination between election protection organizations, student groups, and community activists can help spread the word more quickly in response to last-minute election alerts such as polling location changes, undelivered ballots, and extensions of poll closing times.
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Update: w00t, w00t, Voter Suppression Wiki is mentioned in Noam Cohen’s Casting a Ballot, and a Wary Eye in the New York Times — and I’m quoted (“The interesting challenge — the story in progress — is how do we coordinate our efforts”)!   Mom will be proud 🙂

We’re roughly at the midpoint of the Voter Suppression Wiki’s Workshop on Last-minute strategies for reducing voter suppression.  After brainstorming and identifying opportunities over the weekend, we’re going to be starting to draft the report today.  Tomorrow, we’ll begin work on the press release as well, and issue both the report and press release Wednesday morning at 9 a.m.

We made a huge amount of progress on our Saturday conference call, with some common themes jumping out — in particular, opportunities for community organizations, media, and bloggers to supplement all the work going on.  A good example: Linda talked about how when she discovered she had been removed from the rolls, she found a link on MSNBC that directed her to the 1-866-OUR-VOTE Election Protection hotline who helped her get in touch with the right people.  If information like this was featured prominently on the front pages of mainstream media web sites, it could help a lot of voters …

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