At the 14o Characters (tee hee) Conference some peeps were talking about using Twitter to monitor elections. Yes yes, we’ve been over that before. Shenanigans in authoritarian regimes, blah blah.
Ah, but they were talking about America.
The WSJ wrote it up.
“This is something we can do without running to the lawyers on election day,” said Nancy Scola, an associate editor at techPresident, a blog that focuses on how campaigns are using the Web. “A lot of problems can be solved by people making noise” and can be resolved by open communication rather than election lawsuits, she said.
A great point about the selection bias that you need to consider with any tech question:
The use of technologies like Twitter to encourage voter participation in the U.S. raises questions because not everyone has access to this type of service, and election watchers who use it are seeing only a small, savvy part of the population. Might not have helped the Ohio 2004 problems.
