Constitutional Law

Yale Professor Lauds New Wiki Election Monitoring Tool, But Notes 'Kinks' To Be Worked Out

A wiki-powered Web site to monitor Election Day snafus, myfairelection.com, has been launched, Yale Law School professor Heather K. Gerken reported on Balkinization. Gerken, a frequent participant at ACS events, said the new Web site is intended to help track voting problems by “creating a real time ‘weather map’ of voting conditions across the country.” The election monitoring Web site, created by Harvard professor Archon Fung, “should be extremely helpful for election officials and campaigns trying to prevent modest glitches from developing into genuine problems, while enabling reporters to do a better job of reporting on conditions on the ground,” Gerken wrote.

In an earlier Balkinization post on the election monitoring Web tool, Gerken, nonetheless, noted some “kinks to work out.” Gerken wrote that:

Fung has already thought hard about two obstacles – getting people to participate and avoiding the problem of spamming. Here’s another: figuring out how to ensure that the site doesn’t generate or amplify false rumors.

 

A non-wiki solution to the problem of misreporting would be to allow only trained election monitors to post. Fung is halfway there, as he envisions an army of trained monitors assisting with the site. But I’m quite skeptical even as to the viability of Fung’s more limited proposal. It would take a mammoth amount of resources and legwork to get trained monitors in every polling place in the country (and some legal work, as some states ban election monitors in polling places.)”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on October 28, 2008 (boomark / email).