On election day, whether you pull the lever, touch the screen or punch the card you always pull the curtain. But a number of people this year are advocating you make your vote more public
by photographing it and uploading it to the web.
David Ardia
of Harvard’s Citizen Media Law Project explains why this year your vote should be worth a thousand words.
For more information on recording your vote, please visit:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/documenting-your-vote
After these many months, the campaign season is finally coming to a close. All of the angles have been explored, all the polls parsed and the candidates thoroughly vetted. Or not. Politico’s Kenneth Vogel rounds up a list of documents that the so-called candidates of change never did produce.
On election day, whether you pull the lever, touch the screen or punch the card you always pull the curtain. But a number of people this year are advocating you make your vote more public
by photographing it and uploading it to the web.
David Ardia
of Harvard’s Citizen Media Law Project explains why this year your vote should be worth a thousand words.
For more information on recording your vote, please visit:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/documenting-your-vote
Despite the billions spent on elections, there's little research on how effective commercials, phone calls, or door-to-door efforts are at producing votes. Professor Donald Green, who's conducted hundreds of studies over the past decade, found that advertising and robo-calls do very little but that a novel, if slightly disturbing, approach actually does increase turnout.
The bad news for traditional media is seemingly unending. From
The Christian Science Monitor
to TIME Inc. to ABC News
to Radar magazine. In fact, when Radar folded last week, reporter Ana Marie Cox found herself with credentials to cover the McCain campaign, but no funding. Instead of giving up her seat on the press bus, she went all public radio on the problem and launched a
pledge drive. From a Palin press van, Cox says the pledges poured forth.
As the election comes to a close, many campaign reporters are looking back at their time on the trail. Michael Hastings, who was writing for Newsweek but quit out of disgust with the whole ordeal, explains why he couldn't take it any longer.
The
2000 and, to a lesser extent, 2004 election nights were big debacles for exit pollsters. Will 2008 be any different? Joe Lenski, co-founder and executive vice president of Edison Media Research, will conduct the exit polling for the TV news networks and the AP this year. He discusses how the process has changed.
When the exit polls are released from the quarantine room at 5pm EST on election day, they’ll be available to the major news broadcasters. They’ll also be incomplete, probably misleading and almost certainly leaked over the internet. Politico.com senior political writer David Kuhn says what the polls will certainly show is how potent and tempting the information is.
