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Crowdsourcing poll-watching

As concerns about miscounted or undercounted votes have begun to swirl around, a number of groups are launching crowd-powered poll monitoring projects:

On Twitter, Andy Carvin from NPR notes that he's testing out a tag—#votereport—that Twitterers can use to report voting irregularities. (UPDATE: More information on this effort—which will include a map featuring real-time tweets re. voting problems—here.)

Citizen journalism project The Uptake is planning to send reporters with live streaming camera phones to a number of battleground states to cover the polls for their Vote Chasers project. In this video they interview voters at crowded early voting sites in Florida.

SourceWatch has launched a nonpartisan Election Protection Wiki, which notes the states at the most risk for election tampering, and encourages users to collect and log incident reports from a variety of sources.

While normally voters would be relying on reporters to collate and publicize instances of vote suppression, these efforts bring a new set of eyes and ears into the mix. These are great examples of the public creating public media.