Hey, should there be a new website/program up to strategize activism for voting problems and voting machines? I have some webspace and I'm a programmer. I'm idly trying to consider what would be helpful to write for a community-based project to track voting problems in various counties - whether monitoring the election or recording communications with election officials before the election. Below are some notes - please leave comments below for ideas, suggestions, and offers to help.
This is one of those areas where we get really charged up on a discussion board, but then get frustrated because we know there are things to do and can't think of what they are. So, I'm trying to think of what sort of things we could actually do as a distributed community.
First thing that comes to mind is that there are a variety of issues about the vote counting system. Some are national level, others are specific to the state, others are specific to the county.
So it seems that what might be helpful is a complete listing of all counties in the nation that have non-ideal voting machines - a community could help put those together. Then, we could get the list together of all the county commissioners for those counties.
I am thinking that it could be a simple site where the community could input a county, along with what state it's in, and then people could append status updates for each county as things happen, along with the results of their activism and what else they need help with. The status updates could go against the county, state, or the nation - it would include online discussion as well. Then if someone felt the urge to "do something", they could go to this site and find clear instructions of what number to call or what meeting to attend.
Finally, I think it might be valuable to have an online record of pre-election conversations held with various election officials, in case there are problems during the election.
I imagine there are some sites that might already be doing this. If you know of some, leave a comment - or if you have suggestions of what else might be a valuable feature, leave a comment too. I'm a freelance web programmer by profession (php, perl, databases), so if we can come up with a clear idea of a useful project that fits my skills, I could put some hours in to launch it.
Please mention this diary entry to others if you think it deserves more discussion.