Video Vote Vigil is asking for volunteer videographers to send them video of disturbances outside polling locations on Election Day. Jon Lebkowsky writes that they aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented. "We're hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we'll have video and photo records which we'll place online as close to realtime as possible." They're especially looking for people who know how to make digital video, edit to within 10MB, and upload.

This is another emerging example of citizen's media in action, and specifically a kind of sousveillance, watching from below (rather than surveillance, watching from above).

Of course, as we all know from Rashomon, one person's voter intimidation is another person's prevention of voting fraud. But with clear signs of an organized campaign to "delay the vote" underway in Ohio, Florida and probably elsewhere (the idea being to make so many nitpicking challenges to voters' qualifications that lines grow and people get tired of waiting and give up on voting), this project may turn out to be a vital contribution to the post-Election-Day debate.

Campaigns & Elections | Citizens Media | Emergent Democracy
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